South Korea’s Lee calls for speed in launching mega chip projects

SEOUL: South Korean president Lee Jae Myung on Monday ordered officials to move quickly to get to work on major chip and AI projects announced last week.

He warned that delays in permits, land acquisition, and securing power and water supply could undermine the country’s bid to dominate advanced industries.

“In this situation, it appears the outcome will be decided by who moves faster and who secures the lead first,” Lee told a government meeting. “Only speed matters,” he said.

Lee noted that the Yongin industrial complex took six years to progress from site approval to groundbreaking despite being considered relatively fast, and called for environmental reviews and other approval processes to be streamlined where possible.

He said procedures typically handled sequentially should run in parallel and urged officials to secure power and water infrastructure in advance, highlighting electricity supply as a key issue for chip projects.

Lee said companies had raised concerns about baseload power supply even though there has been an expansion in renewable energy, and ordered officials to address those concerns in advance.

South Korea last week unveiled more than US$576 billion in investment including in chip and AI industries aimed at securing global dominance and encouraging growth beyond the Seoul metropolitan area.

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will each invest ₩400 trillion (US$260 billion) to build new chip manufacturing sites each in the southwest of the country, while another ₩81 trillion is expected to be invested in a chip-packaging cluster in the Chungcheong region.

The chip cluster in South Korea’s southwest region will be developed at the site of a military airport in Gwangju, and discussions include both Samsung and SK Hynix being at the site, South Korea’s presidential chief of staff Kang Hoon-sik said on Monday.

Samsung declined to comment. SK Hynix was not immediately available for comment.