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A view of SK hynix’s semiconductor fab in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province. SK hynix<\/p>\nA view of SK hynix’s semiconductor fab in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province. SK hynix<\/p>\n
Following global Big Tech companies that have offered blank checks to secure memory semiconductor production lines, oil money from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is now showing interest in Korea’s memory chipmakers. Officials from the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and Mubadala, will personally visit the plants of Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and SK hynix (000660.KS) \u2014 an unprecedented move that analysts say reflects how the competition to secure supply rights through financial backing, amid an unprecedented memory shortage, is expanding into a contest between nations.<\/p>\n
According to industry sources on Tuesday, a delegation comprising UAE government and state investment fund officials will visit the semiconductor plants of Samsung Electronics and SK hynix in succession on Wednesday. The delegation includes Omran Sharaf, Assistant Minister for Advanced Sciences and Technology at the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Abdulla Saif Al Nuaimi, UAE Ambassador to Korea; and Abdulla Essa Almulla, Assistant Undersecretary for Investment Planning and Promotion at the UAE Ministry of Investment.<\/p>\n
The visit is a follow-up to an economic cooperation project launched after President Lee Jae-myung’s state visit to the UAE in November last year. The UAE has identified AI as the centerpiece of its post-oil strategy and is pursuing a “Middle East version of the Stargate Project” to build a 5-gigawatt (GW) AI data center in Abu Dhabi.<\/p>\n
Industry observers view the UAE visit as going beyond a simple tour, seeing it as an extension of the “capital expenditure (CAPEX) sharing model” that Big Tech firms have recently proposed to SK hynix. Global Big Tech companies including Google and Amazon have recently made reverse proposals to invest directly in SK hynix’s first plant (Y1) at its Yongin semiconductor cluster or to fund the purchase of ASML’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment, in response to an unprecedented memory supply crunch.<\/p>\n
For the UAE, securing a stable supply chain for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and enterprise solid-state drives (eSSD) is essential to operating its 5GW data center.<\/p>\n
“There is a high possibility that the UAE, backed by its cash mobilization capacity, will demand the allocation of dedicated production lines from Samsung Electronics or SK hynix, or discuss advance payments to strengthen the binding force of long-term agreements (LTAs),” an industry official said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A view of SK hynix’s semiconductor fab in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province. SK hynix Following global Big Tech companies…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[9405,544,699,697,9406,276,241,240,275,9407,9408,9404],"class_list":{"0":"post-12621","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sk","8":"tag-adia","9":"tag-ai-data-center","10":"tag-hbm","11":"tag-memory-semiconductor","12":"tag-mubadala","13":"tag-samsung-electronics","14":"tag-sk","15":"tag-sk-group","16":"tag-sk-hynix","17":"tag-sovereign-wealth-fund","18":"tag-stargate-project","19":"tag-uae-delegation"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}