“This is a very risky business that’s not for the faint of heart,” said Len Jelinek of the market research firm IHS iSuppli in Scottsdale, Ariz. “It’s like putting down $1 billion on the craps table. You’ve just thrown the dice and they’re in the air. You hope they land the right way and you make money.”

Image Burton Nicoson, with a silicon wafer, said Samsung chose Austin because of its support system and the University of Texas. Credit... Ben Sklar for The New York Times

The semiconductor industry is an international one. Although it began in Silicon Valley, it has since gone global and many of the world’s chips are now made in Asia. Chip companies prefer to have their manufacturing scattered across the globe to be closer to customers and engineers — and to reduce risk in case of a cataclysmic event, like the recent earthquake in Japan. New and expanded plants are under construction in China, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States.

Samsung chose to expand in Austin, said Burton Nicoson, vice president of manufacturing at Samsung Austin Semiconductor, because of “the infrastructure and support system here — you can’t get that from anywhere else.”

Other draws were the city’s legacy of semiconductor manufacturing and the University of Texas, which produces large numbers of skilled engineers, Mr. Nicoson said.

“Austin has a youth about it,” he said. “It really helps us with recruiting.”

While smartphones and tablets are largely driving the semiconductor industry’s growth spurt, demand for chips for personal computers and data centers, where information is stored on thousands of servers run by companies like Google and Microsoft, remains strong. Last year 350.9 million computers were shipped, versus 289.7 million tablets and mobile phones, according to the technology research firm Gartner.

“Semiconductors are the critical components for the whole infrastructure that gets data to you quickly,” said Bob Johnson, research vice president in Gartner’s semiconductor group in San Jose.

Intel, the world’s biggest chip maker, is spending up to $13 billion to build two new factories and upgrade four others in Oregon and Arizona over the next few years. Construction began in the fourth quarter of last year and is expected to be complete in 2013.