By Hyunjoo Jin and Heejin Kim <\/p>\n
SEOUL, July 2 (Reuters) – SK Hynix said on Thursday it planned to invest 100 trillion won ($64.38 billion) to build \u200cnew NAND memory chip and packaging factories as part of a massive \u200cinvestment programme aimed at addressing a shortage driven by the AI boom. <\/p>\n
The projects in the country’s \u200bcentral city of Cheongju outlined on Thursday come under a $2.1 trillion plan unveiled by the chipmaker and its local rival Samsung Electronics on Monday that also included a new chip cluster in the southwest and existing projects. <\/p>\n
South Korea is hoping the investments will \u200cdouble the country’s memory chip \u2060production capacity within five years. <\/p>\n
At an event on Thursday attended by South Korea’s president, SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung said the company \u2060would spend 80 trillion won to build a new factory for NAND memory chip production by 2029 and 20 trillion won for a chip packaging plant by late 2027 \u200bin Cheongju. <\/p>\n
The \u200bplan to invest 100 trillion won in \u200bCheongju was announced on Monday, but \u200cdetails of the investment were not provided at the time. <\/p>\n
The huge capacity buildout by the South Korean chipmakers is a major political win for the country’s President Lee Jae Myung, though it is stoking fears of a painful reckoning if AI spending cools. <\/p>\n
SK Hynix shares slumped 7.1% and Samsung shares were down 8.6% on Thursday, \u200chit by a global selloff in chipmakers as \u200bMeta Platforms’ plan to sell computing power raised \u200bquestions over excess AI computing capacity. <\/p>\n
But \u200bat the SK Hynix event, Kwak expressed confidence in the market \u200cfor NAND, a storage chip that \u200bretains data even when \u200ba device is turned off, unlike a DRAM chip. <\/p>\n
“While demand for NAND has been increasing and is expected to continue growing in the future, NAND \u200bsupply is constrained,” he \u200csaid. <\/p>\n
SK Hynix said it planned to start construction of the new Cheongju \u200bNAND factory, known as M17, next year. <\/p>\n
($1 = 1,553.2400 won) <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin \u200band Heejin Kim; Editing by Jamie Freed) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Hyunjoo Jin and Heejin Kim SEOUL, July 2 (Reuters) – SK Hynix said on Thursday it planned…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[15171,958,1482,23785,28972,2782,276,241,275,33],"class_list":["post-71859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sk-hynix","tag-cheongju","tag-investment","tag-memory-chip","tag-nand-memory","tag-plan","tag-production-capacity","tag-samsung-electronics","tag-sk","tag-sk-hynix","tag-south-korea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71859","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=71859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}