By Hyunjoo Jin <\/p>\n
SEOUL, July 2 (Reuters) – SK Hynix said it would invest 100 trillion won ($64.38 billion) to build new chip plants, including one for NAND flash memory, as part of a massive South Korean investment drive aimed at \u200cspreading returns from the AI boom beyond Seoul. The projects in the central city of Cheongju outlined on Thursday are included \u200cin a broader $2.1 trillion plan unveiled by the chipmaker and its local rival Samsung Electronics this week that also included a new chip cluster in the southwest and \u200bexisting projects. The huge capacity buildout by the South Korean chipmakers is a major political win for the country’s President Lee Jae Myung, who wants the AI windfall to help revive economies beyond the Seoul metropolitan area, though it is stoking fears of a painful reckoning if AI spending cools. At an event on Thursday attended by Lee, SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung said the company would spend 80 trillion won to build a new \u200cfactory for NAND memory chip production by 2029 \u2060and 20 trillion won for a chip packaging plant by late 2027 in Cheongju. The plan to invest 100 trillion won in Cheongju was announced on Monday, but details of the investment were not provided at \u2060the time. South Korea is hoping the investments will double the country’s memory chip production capacity within five years. Samsung and SK Hynix are the world’s largest manufacturers of memory chips alongside U.S. rival Micron. The investments come as demand from AI hyperscalers has caused a global shortage of all types of \u200bmemory chips. \u200bPrices for both NAND flash memory, a storage chip that retains data \u200beven when a device is turned off, and DRAM \u200chave soared to historical highs. CHIP SELLOFF SK Hynix shares ended down 15% and Samsung shares closed 9% lower on Thursday, hit by a global selloff in chipmakers as Meta Platforms’ plan to sell computing power raised questions over excess AI computing capacity. Michael Burry, the investor whose successful bets against the U.S. housing market in 2008 were recounted in the movie “The Big Short,” expressed caution about the massive South Korean investment plan in a subscriber-only Substack newsletter on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported. The investment drive set off alarm bells for Burry over whether the \u200cmassive sums of money being poured into AI could ever generate appropriate \u200breturns, according to the report, which added that he had made more bearish bets \u200bagainst AI-related stocks. “I see that as the beginning of the \u200bend,” he told subscribers. At the SK Hynix event, Kwak expressed confidence in AI-driven demand for chips. “While demand for \u200cNAND has been increasing and is expected to continue \u200bgrowing in the future, NAND supply \u200bis constrained,” he said. SK Hynix said it planned to start construction of the new Cheongju NAND factory, known as M17, next year. <\/p>\n
In April, SK Hynix broke ground on the P&T7 fab at Cheongju, a dedicated advanced packaging facility for AI memory, including \u200bhigh-bandwidth memory. However, the company cautioned in a filing \u200cthis week that the long-term investment plans could change depending on global chip demand and spending by major customers. Factors \u200bsuch as delays in selecting and securing construction sites could also cause it to postpone plans, it added. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200bHyunjoo Jin and Heejin Kim; Editing by Brenda Goh and Jamie Freed) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Hyunjoo Jin SEOUL, July 2 (Reuters) – SK Hynix said it would invest 100 trillion won ($64.38…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71972,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[15171,958,146,1482,14612,276,27299,241,275,1484],"class_list":["post-71971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sk-hynix","tag-cheongju","tag-investment","tag-lee-jae-myung","tag-memory-chip","tag-nand-flash-memory","tag-samsung-electronics","tag-seoul-metropolitan-area","tag-sk","tag-sk-hynix","tag-south-korean"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71971","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=71971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}