Elpida is considering building a chip factory in either China, Japan, Singapore, or Taiwan The head of Japanese memory chip maker Elpida Memory held talks with Taiwanese officials last week about incentives for building a chip factory on the island.Yukio Sakamoto, Elpida’s chief executive officer met with the company’s foundry partner in Taiwan, Powerchip Semiconductor, as part of his visit to the island, but Elpida says it has made no decisions yet, a spokeswoman for the company said Tuesday.Elpida is considering an investment in either China, Japan, Singapore, or Taiwan, and could work with a partner in a joint venture or go it alone, said Tomoko Kobayashi a spokeswoman at Elpida. Powerchip declined to comment.Such a deal would be huge for the winning location, because modern DRAM (dynamic RAM) factories cost around $3 billion and employ thousands of workers. China and Taiwan both have advantages because Elpida already works with partners in both places, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. of Shanghai and Powerchip.Singapore would also rate highly since it’s been labeled one of the best locations in the world for a chip plant investment due to its tax breaks and other incentives. Japan would have home field advantage. The DRAM industry is also ripe for new factories. Most companies in the business have invested in non-DRAM production lines in recent years, mainly NAND flash memory, popular in digital cameras, mobile phones, and iPods. But DRAM prices have surged recently due to strong PC sales, and prices are expected to remain strong over the next several months on anticipated PC demand from the launch of Microsoft Windows Vista.In fact, the spot price of the most popular chips, DDR2 (double data rate, second generation) chips, has surged 15 percent over the past three days, according to DRAMeXchange Technology Inc., an online clearinghouse for the chips. Technology Industry