South Korea commits roughly $1 trillion to chips data centers and humanoid robots

South Korea says it will commit roughly $1 trillion to AI hardware and robotics megaprojects by 2028, with plans spanning new memory-chip capacity, large AI data centers, and commercial humanoid robots. According to Ars Technica, the package brings together government and major companies, with Samsung and SK Hynix committing hundreds of billions of dollars for new chip fabrication plants while other conglomerates back data-center builds.

The headline number sits on top of a narrower bottleneck: high-bandwidth memory used in AI systems. Samsung and SK Hynix have benefited from the AI boom with record profits and higher stock valuations, Ars reports, while shortages and rising chip prices feed through to consumer electronics. The government’s stated goal is to double South Korea’s production of DRAM within five years, but the buildout timeline is measured in years, not quarters; SK Hynix chairman Chey Tae-won is quoted noting that a previous chip manufacturing cluster took nine years to build.

The plan is also an infrastructure project disguised as a software story. Chip fabs and data centers consume electricity and water at industrial scale, and Ars reports that South Korea’s Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment is working to secure gigawatts of power and large volumes of water for southwestern chip plants, alongside additional power for the new data centers. The country’s current generation mix—nuclear and coal each above 30% in 2024, with natural gas near a quarter—means the AI buildout lands directly on fuel imports and grid capacity, not just on chip tool deliveries.

Robotics is the other pillar. Hyundai Motor Company is working to mass manufacture humanoid robots developed by its subsidiary Boston Dynamics, with the stated aim of taking over laborious tasks in factories and other workplaces. That creates a domestic political fight inside the same package: Ars notes public debate about chipmakers’ boom-time profits and proposals to redistribute “excess wealth,” while labor unions oppose the introduction of humanoid robots into the workforce.

The government is also trying to define what it wants to win. Ars reports that South Korea has designated “physical AI” as a national strategic industry, describing systems that let robots and self-driving vehicles interact autonomously with the real world, and it aims to develop a Korean general-purpose “foundation model” based on a world model for physical AI. This is industrial policy with a clear dependency problem: if the country is betting on being indispensable to global AI supply chains, it cannot afford long interruptions in power, water, or skilled labor.

For now, the most concrete constraint is the simplest one: the megaprojects require utilities and permits before they produce a single chip or deploy a single robot. The government is planning gigawatts and water allocations so factories can be built.