South Korea has placed its biggest bet yet on the AI era. The plan commits at least $880bn over a decade to chips, data centres and robots. It is the boldest South Korea AI investment to date, and the government says speed is now the only way to survive.
President Lee Jae Myung unveiled the package on Monday in Seoul, flanked by the heads of Samsung and SK Hynix. He called the two business leaders “national heroes” and framed the spending as a matter of survival. Bloomberg put the total at 1,350 trillion won, or about $880bn.
Lee branded the effort the “Three Mega Projects”. The three pillars are semiconductors, AI data centres and physical AI. He called them the “triple axis for a great leap forward”. “Speed is the only way to survive,” he said.
Four new chip fabs
Samsung and SK Hynix will spend 800 trillion won, around $518bn, on memory chips. Each firm will build two fabs in the south-west, Yonhap reported. The Gwangju and Jeolla area becomes the country’s second chip cluster, alongside the Seoul hub. It is the first real break from the capital region in years.
