South Korean President Lee Jae-myung announced a plan to develop the country’s semiconductor manufacturing operations and expand its AI infrastructure through large-scale investments.
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will each build two chip manufacturing plants in the southwestern part of the country as part of a national project to create a semiconductor industry ecosystem with a total investment of 800 trillion won ($518 billion), the government said. Regional authorities will invest between 5 and 20 trillion won in these projects, the president said.
Samsung and SK Group will allocate 81 trillion won to create a chip packaging cluster near Seoul.
SK Group also plans to invest 1 trillion won in the construction of data centers and 1.1 trillion won in semiconductor facilities. The company did not specify the planned timeline for these investments.
In addition, SK Group, GS Group, and Naver Corp. will allocate 550 trillion won to build data center facilities with a total capacity of 8.4 GW in the coming years as part of the plan announced by the government.
South Korea aims to increase data center capacity to 18.4 GW by 2035 and plans to allocate $19.4 billion to expand production capacity for next-generation memory chips over the next 15 years.
Shares of Samsung Electronics fell 4.8% at the close of trading in Seoul on Monday, while SK Hynix shares fell 1.7% and Naver Corp. shares rose 3.9%.
