South Korea’s $518 billion AI chip push shows crypto is still losing the capital race
Key takeaways
- A South Korean presidential adviser said AI demand could force the companies to finish the work by 2034 or 2035, more than a decade ahead of an earlier 2044 target.
- The driver is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, the specialized chips that feed AI training and the large language models behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude.
- SK Hynix has become the dominant supplier of those chips, a position that made it South Korea's most valuable listed company this month, passing Samsung for the first time in 25 years.
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix plan to invest roughly 800 trillion won, about $518 billion, to build four new chip fabrication plants in South Korea's southwest, the firms said Monday, as part of a national plan to double the country's output of DRAM, or the standard memory used in phones and computers, over five years.
A South Korean presidential adviser said AI demand could force the companies to finish the work by 2034 or 2035, more than a decade ahead of an earlier 2044 target. SK Hynix separately announced plans last week for a roughly $29 billion U.S. stock listing, among the largest ever, to fund further expansion.
The driver is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, the specialized chips that feed AI training and the large language models behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude.