TOKYO -- Western Digital will invest about 500 billion yen ($4.68 billion) over the next three years in a memory chip venture with Toshiba, helping their joint operations recover after a bruising legal spat between the companies.
The investment will help fund construction of a production building at Toshiba's Yokkaichi plant in Mie Prefecture, home to joint chipmaking operations with Western Digital, as well as work on a plant in Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture, set to open in 2020. This will let Toshiba Memory and Western Digital steadily increase joint production of 3-D flash memory chips, which have significantly higher data capacity than their conventional counterparts. Demand for high-capacity memory is growing rapidly, led by customers operating data centers.
