June 30, 2026 – South Korean President Lee Jae-myung has unveiled a sweeping 800 trillion won (roughly $517.9 billion) national initiative designed to catapult the country’s semiconductor sector to new heights while bridging regional economic imbalances nationwide.
Lee hosted a nationwide live-broadcast investment forum at the Blue House Guest House this Monday, with top executives from Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix – the world’s two leading memory chip manufacturers – in attendance. Their presence underscored how central the new strategy is to South Korea’s core chip manufacturing ecosystem.
Driven by a global rush among cloud service operators and tech firms to scale up AI hardware infrastructure, demand for High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chips has far outstripped available supply. As pivotal players riding the AI boom, Samsung and SK Hynix already run major semiconductor production hubs across the Seoul metropolitan zone and surrounding areas, and are ramping up output expansion at full speed.
The national government has rolled out a comprehensive set of supportive policies to bolster industrial competitiveness. Over the next 15 years, authorities will allocate 30 trillion won to research and development for next-generation memory technologies, aiming to build a fully integrated industrial chain spanning memory wafer fabrication, advanced chip packaging, and semiconductor raw materials and manufacturing equipment.
In addition, state support will drastically shorten corporate investment timelines. Completion schedules for new wafer fabrication plants, initially slated for the mid-2040s, will be moved forward to the mid-2030s – cutting construction timelines by up to 12 years. Officials also project that domestic DRAM production capacity will double within five years, alongside a fourfold expansion of the global memory chip market over the same timeframe.
From a corporate perspective, Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong noted that existing production capacities can no longer keep pace with surging AI chip orders, revealing the firm is weighing a new investment complex in Gwangju.
Samsung also made a formal investment announcement on the same day, committing a combined 2,655 trillion won to semiconductor clusters in Yongin and Pyeongtaek, a figure that incorporates its previously disclosed 2,030 trillion won investment roadmap to drastically boost manufacturing output.
SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won outlined the conglomerate’s own 1,100 trillion won semiconductor expansion plan during the forum. Around 600 trillion won will go toward DRAM capacity upgrades at the Yongin semiconductor cluster, while roughly 100 trillion won will fund NAND production expansion in Cheongju. The Yongin semiconductor complex, originally scheduled to finish construction in 2045, will now wrap up development a full 12 years ahead of schedule.
