South Korea unveils a roughly $900B AI and chip plan it calls a survival strategy

South Korea has put a price tag on its AI ambitions, and it is one of the largest national tech commitments on record. On June 29, 2026, President Lee Jae Myung unveiled a public-private investment plan worth approximately $880–900 billion, or around 1,350 trillion won, to be deployed over the next decade. Lee described the effort as a “national survival strategy.” He shared the stage with leaders from Samsung and SK Hynix. Three bets, one decade The plan rests on three flagship projects: memory chips, AI data centers, and physical AI and robotics. Samsung and SK Hynix are committing approximately $518 billion, or 800 trillion won, to build new memory fabrication plants in the Gwangju region. An additional approximately $52 billion is set aside for an HBM packaging hub. HBM stands for high-bandwidth memory, a design that stacks memory chips so they can feed data to AI processors quickly. The second project is AI data centers. The plan calls for approximately $356 billion, or 550 trillion won, with a target of 8.4 GW of capacity by 2029. SK Group, GS Group and Naver are backing the data center buildout. The longer-range goal is more than 18 GW of AI data center capacity by 2035. Seo...