Toshiba, SanDisk to invest in $16.7 billion on NAND plants

TOKYO, JAPAN: Toshiba Corp and SanDisk Corp will jointly invest as much as 1.8 trillion yen ($16.7 billion) to build two new NAND flash memory plants in Japan, the Nikkei business daily reported on Monday.

The world's No.2 maker of the flash memory chips after South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co Ltd will begin construction of both plants in the business year starting in April and bring them up to full capacity as early as in the year starting in April 2013, the paper said without citing sources.

Toshiba will decide this week on the construction of the two plants, which would quadruple production capacity, the paper said.

Toshiba said nothing has been decided.