South Korea plans to invest almost US$7 billion in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2027 in an effort to become a global leader in cutting-edge semiconductors, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said yesterday.
The country is home to Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc — the world’s top two makers of memory chips, including the premium high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in the hardware that powers AI.
The semiconductor industry is a crucial pillar of South Korea’s export-driven economy, and Yoon told a high-powered meeting of officials and tech sector executives that his administration wants the country to lead the world in AI chips.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“It is no exaggeration to say that the future of the semiconductor industry depends on AI,” his office quoted Yoon as saying.
“We will invest 9.4 trillion won [US$6.94 billion] in the AI and AI semiconductor fields by 2027,” and set up a separate 1.4 trillion won fund “to help the growth of innovative AI semiconductor companies,” he said.
Representatives from Samsung, SK Hynix, tech giant Naver Corp and AI chip start-up Sapeon Inc attended the meeting, Yoon’s office said.
Motivated by geopolitical concerns surrounding Taiwan and the larger US-China rivalry, Seoul and Tokyo are vying with Washington and major European nations to boost domestic chip production with massive investment and subsidies.
The AI chip market is currently dominated by Silicon Valley titan Nvidia Corp, to which SK Hynix supplies HBM chips.
South Korea aims to become a world leader “in AI technology and go beyond memory chips to conquer the future AI chip market,” Yoon told the meeting. “The semiconductor competition taking place now is an industrial war and an all-out war between nations.”
Semiconductors are South Korea’s leading export. Outbound shipments last month hit US$11.7 billion, the highest level in almost two years and one-fifth of South Korea’s total exports, South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy figures showed.
TECH BOOST: New TSMC wafer fabs in Arizona are to dramatically improve US advanced chip production, a report by market research firm TrendForce said With Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) pouring large funds into Arizona, the US is expected to see an improvement in its status to become the second-largest maker of advanced semiconductors in 2027, Taipei-based market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said in a report last week. TrendForce estimates the US would account for a 21 percent share in the global advanced integrated circuit (IC) production market by 2027, sharply up from the current 9 percent, as TSMC is investing US$65 billion to build three wafer fabs in Arizona, the report said. TrendForce defined the advanced chipmaking processes as the 7-nanometer process or more
China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) plans to start mass-producing its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip in the first quarter of next year, even as it struggles to make enough chips due to US restrictions, two people familiar with the matter said. The telecoms conglomerate has sent samples of the Ascend 910C — its newest chip, meant to rival those made by US chipmaker Nvidia Corp — to some technology firms and started taking orders, the sources told Reuters. The 910C is being made by top Chinese contract chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) on its N+2 process, but a lack
NVIDIA PLATFORM: Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and a Taiwan site is to enter production next month, Nvidia wrote on its blog Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the world’s biggest electronics manufacturer, yesterday said it is expanding production capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) servers based on Nvidia Corp’s Blackwell chips in Taiwan, the US and Mexico to cope with rising demand. Hon Hai’s new AI-enabled factories are to use Nvidia’s Omnivores platform to create 3D digital twins to plan and simulate automated production lines at a factory in Hsinchu, the company said in a statement. Nvidia’s Omnivores platform is for developing industrial AI simulation applications and helps bring facilities online faster. Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and the
Who would not want a social media audience that grows without new content? During the three years she paused production of her short do-it-yourself (DIY) farmer’s lifestyle videos, Chinese vlogger Li Ziqi (李子柒), 34, has seen her YouTube subscribers increase to 20.2 million from about 14 million. While YouTube is banned in China, her fan base there — although not the size of YouTube’s MrBeast, who has 330 million subscribers — is close to 100 million across the country’s social media platforms Douyin (抖音), Sina Weibo (新浪微博) and Xiaohongshu (小紅書). When Li finally released new videos last week — ending what has
RSS