South Korea unveils more than $1 trillion chip and AI investment drive
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung announced a strategy to channel more than $1 trillion into semiconductor manufacturing and artificial-intelligence infrastructure, calling it a “great leap forward” meant to secure the country’s dominance in AI.
The bulk is private. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, with suppliers, are slated to spend about $518 billion on two new fabrication sites each, while SK Group, GS Group and Naver are backing roughly $356 billion in AI data center construction, with expansion targeted through 2035. Public money is comparatively small: local governments in Gwangju and South Jeolla province are contributing several billion dollars, alongside a regional chip-packaging cluster.
The scale signals how central memory chips and AI compute have become to South Korea’s industrial policy, as Samsung and SK Hynix race to supply the high-bandwidth memory that AI accelerators depend on. The concentration of projects in the southwest has drawn opposition criticism that the siting is politically motivated rather than commercially driven, a sign the rollout will be contested at home even as the headline figure lands.