South Korea plans more than $900B in AI infrastructure investment

South Korean technology companies have outlined more than $900 billion in planned investment aimed at strengthening infrastructure for the AI era. The figure is not spending on AI models alone: much of it is directed toward chip-manufacturing capacity, the memory required by AI systems and large-scale data centers.

Under the announced plans, Samsung and SK Hynix are expected to invest about $518 billion in four new memory fabrication plants in southwestern South Korea. Roughly $52 billion is earmarked for a high-bandwidth memory (HBM) packaging hub, while companies including SK, GS and Naver plan around $356 billion in AI data-center investment through 2035.

South Korea’s government has described semiconductors, AI data centers and “physical AI” as three pillars of the country’s next industrial era. Physical AI refers to intelligent systems operating through robots, factories and other machines in the real world. The strategy reflects how the global AI race increasingly depends not only on models, but also on control of computing capacity, memory, energy and industrial infrastructure.