South Korean tech giants commit over $550B to ease ‘ RAMageddon’

The world’s two largest memory chip companies plan to invest $518 billion (~800 trillion won) to build four new memory fabs in southwestern South Korea, a region that has historically attracted little semiconductor investment. The announcement is part of the country’s sweeping national investment plan spanning semiconductors, AI data centers, and physical AI, which was unveiled at a presidential briefing on Monday, with the chairmen of Samsung and SK Hynix in attendance. The plan breaks down into three buckets. In the memory chip bucket is $518 billion for four new memory fabs in the southwest, plus $52 billion for an HBM (high bandwidth memory) packaging hub in the central region. Then there’s another $356 billion (550 trillion won) for AI data centers to be built by Korean tech and energy behemoths such as SK, GS and Naver through 2035. All told, South Korean tech companies have committed to spend over $900 billion on AI and the demands for chips it is creating. With this, the nation hopes to catapult itself into becoming more of an AI power player than it already is. Currently, Samsung and SK Hynix ( along with U.S. memory chip maker Micron ) are all enjoying record demand from what’s been called RAMageddon , a worldwide shortage of memory chips caused by the AI buildout. …