South Korea expects artificial intelligence, and the chip fabs feeding it, to add between 25 and 30 gigawatts to national electricity demand, which by the country’s own reactor standards is roughly 20 nuclear plants. The government now has to decide whether to build them.
The figure comes from Kim Sung-hwan, minister of climate, energy and environment, in an interview with Reuters published on Tuesday.
Kim told the agency that nuclear is “an essential element to consider within the power generation structure of our energy mix”, ahead of an update to the long-term energy roadmap that the government will publish next month and that extends the planning horizon by two years to 2040.
What has changed is the construction calendar. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are pulling forward fabs that were not meant to exist for another two decades.
“Projects originally planned to be built by around 2045 have been significantly accelerated and are now due to be completed by the early 2030s,” Kim told Reuters.
