South Korea wants to build its next great chip cluster far from Seoul, in the country’s rural southwest, and it wants to do so at a pace with little precedent.
The plan collides with a harder limit than any zoning map, because the region does not yet have the electricity or the water to run it.
The Honam semiconductor complex, a roughly 800 trillion won ($540bn) bet championed by President Lee Jae Myung, is meant to be operating by the end of 2030.
It forms one arm of a wider drive worth more than $880bn across chips, AI and data centres, and it leans, as ever, on Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, joined here by Amkor Technology Korea.
Seoul has settled on a Gwangju military airport site of about 8.3 million square metres, prized for flat land, transport links and existing utilities.
