Chip giant, sudden big move! Put into production 1-2 years ahead of schedule!
Big news from the memory chip giant! According to South Korean media, memory chip giant Samsung Electronics plans to advance the start-up of its first wafer factory in Yongin to 2029, 1-2 years earlier than the original plan. The early start of production will help Samsung Electronics respond more quickly to the surge in global market demand for AI chips. Another giant, SK Hynix, has also made new moves. The company has raised approximately US$26.5 billion by issuing American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) on Nasdaq in the United States, and is expected to inject a large amount of US dollar funds into the Korean foreign exchange market. This inflow of funds is expected to ease the depreciation pressure on the Korean won.
Big news from the memory chip giant! According to South Korean media, memory chip giant Samsung Electronics plans to advance the start-up of its first wafer factory in Yongin to 2029, 1-2 years earlier than the original plan. The early start of production will help Samsung Electronics respond more quickly to the surge in global market demand for AI chips. Another giant, SK Hynix, has also made new moves. The company has raised approximately US$26.5 billion by issuing American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) on Nasdaq in the United States, and is expected to inject a large amount of US dollar funds into the Korean foreign exchange market. This inflow of funds is expected to ease the depreciation pressure on the Korean won. Samsung Electronics semiconductor factory plans to start production ahead of schedule On July 12, Yonhap News Agency reported that industry sources revealed that Samsung Electronics is advancing the start-up time of its first semiconductor manufacturing plant in Yongin Chip Cluster to 2029, one to two years earlier than originally planned. The accelerated timeline comes as the South Korean government is accelerating the development of the Yongin National Industrial Park. The park is a national strategic project in South Korea and will be built as a next-generation semiconductor manufacturing hub for Samsung Electronics. Sources said Samsung Electronics currently plans to start operations in 2029 at the first of six semiconductor factories in the Yongin Industrial Park, located south of Seoul. An industry source said that the first factory will be put into production ahead of schedule, which will enable Samsung to respond more quickly to the rapidly growing global demand for artificial intelligence chips. Samsung Electronics said last month that under its large-scale project investment plan, the company plans to invest 2,030 trillion won (approximately US$1.35 trillion) in the Pyeongtaek and Yongin semiconductor clusters, and invest 400 trillion won to build two new chip factories in Gwangju, 270 kilometers south of Seoul. Recently, Samsung Electronics announced that it has begun mass production of its most advanced data center storage drives, which will be used in Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin platform. Samsung said in a statement that its PM1763 enterprise-class solid-state drive has officially entered the mass production stage. The product is equipped with Samsung's latest V-NAND flash memory chip and a newly developed 4-nanometer process controller. The read and write speed is more than double that of the previous generation product. It is also equipped with a liquid cooling system to support the heat dissipation needs of continuous high-speed operation during AI training and inference. PM1763 has previously been unveiled at the NVIDIA GTC conference. According to Samsung Electronics, the core design goal of this product is to reduce the data latency of advanced processors and AI accelerators. The introduction of liquid cooling technology is aimed at maintaining stable read and write performance under high-intensity AI workloads and avoiding slowdowns caused by heat dissipation bottlenecks. According to data from market research firm TrendForce, in the first quarter of 2026, Samsung ranked first in the enterprise solid-state drive market with a market share of 35%, followed by SK Hynix, Micron Technology, Kioxia Holdings and Kioxia partner SanDisk. Preliminary results announced on July 7 showed that in the second quarter of this year, Samsung Electronics' operating profit soared 19 times year-on-year to 89.4 trillion won (approximately US$58 billion), setting a record high. Not only did it significantly exceed market expectations, but its single-quarter profit exceeded the total profit for the three years from 2023 to 2025. SK Hynix raises huge sums of money, which may ease the pressure on the Korean won’s depreciation SK Hynix raised approximately 40 trillion won ($26.5 billion) by issuing American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) on Nasdaq in the United States, which is expected to inject a large amount of U.S. dollar funds into the Korean foreign exchange market. The funds raised from the U.S. listing are scheduled to arrive on Monday (July 13). According to Korean media reports, given that SK Hynix plans to use most of the funds for domestic investment (including Yongin Semiconductor Cluster), it is expected that most of the US dollar-denominated financing amount will be converted into Korean won, thus increasing the supply of US dollars in the domestic foreign exchange market. According to reports, this inflow is expected to ease the depreciation pressure on the South Korean won. Against the background of the overall strength of the U.S. dollar and the increase in overseas investments by Korean companies, the Korean won's exchange rate against the U.S. dollar has remained weak. Market experts believe the expected inflow is comparable to the U.S. dollar liquidity provided by the $60 billion currency swap agreement between the Bank of Korea and the Federal Reserve during the market turmoil in 2020. Although the swap agreement was capped at $60 billion, the actual dollar amount withdrawn was $19.87 billion.
SK Hynix CEO Guo Luzheng said on July 10 that the global storage industry will face the most serious supply shortage in history in 2027, and predicted that although the company actively expands production capacity, memory chip demand will continue to exceed its production capacity and will continue into the next decade. Guo Luzheng said: "Customer demand continues to rise, and our production capacity is limited. We still predict that even after 2030, customer demand will still be higher than our supply capacity. But we are doing our best to solve this problem." Guo Luzheng said that customers sign long-term contracts because "they think the shortage situation will last longer." Guo Luzheng's statement came after the South Korean chipmaker's stunning debut. On July 10, SK Hynix ADR rose 13% from the issue price on its first day of listing on the U.S. stock market. The company has become a key player in the AI supply chain with its leadership in the development of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), whose HBM products are used in Nvidia chipsets. Even so, there is still some speculation in the market that the AI investment cycle is approaching a turning point, which is one of the reasons why chip stocks have been under pressure recently. Market concerns have intensified following reports that Apple is seeking to diversify parts of its semiconductor supply chain to Chinese suppliers and that Meta is seeking to commercialize excess AI computing power. However, industry executives and analysts believe that memory chip supply still lags behind demand. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last month that the shortage of AI memory chips will last for several years due to strong demand, adding that SK Hynix will remain the company's largest supplier of memory chips. UBS also predicts that the global DRAM industry will remain in short supply until at least the second quarter of 2028. Similarly, Bank of America still holds a constructive view on the AI investment cycle, estimating that global capital expenditures by ultra-large-scale enterprises will reach approximately US$851 billion this year and US$1.15 trillion next year, supported by strong cloud service order backlogs, improved AI investment returns, and growing demand for computing-intensive AI applications. Bank of America said the roughly $244 billion raised by very large companies this year largely reflects balance sheet optimization rather than a sign of financing stress, arguing that capital remains abundant to support continued infrastructure investment. In addition, Micron said that due to the surge in demand for memory chips in the AI era and the U.S. government's push to strengthen semiconductor manufacturing, the company plans to invest more than $250 billion in the United States by 2035, higher than the $200 billion investment plan announced last year. (
SK Hynix CEO Guo Luzheng said on July 10 that the global storage industry will face the most serious supply shortage in history in 2027, and predicted that although the company actively expands production capacity, memory chip demand will continue to exceed its production capacity and will continue into the next decade. Guo Luzheng said: "Customer demand continues to rise, and our production capacity is limited. We still predict that even after 2030, customer demand will still be higher than our supply capacity. But we are doing our best to solve this problem." Guo Luzheng said that customers sign long-term contracts because "they think the shortage situation will last longer." Guo Luzheng's statement came after the South Korean chipmaker's stunning debut. On July 10, SK Hynix ADR rose 13% from the issue price on its first day of listing on the U.S. stock market. The company has become a key player in the AI supply chain with its leadership in the development of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), whose HBM products are used in Nvidia chipsets. Even so, there is still some speculation in the market that the AI investment cycle is approaching a turning point, which is one of the reasons why chip stocks have been under pressure recently. Market concerns have intensified following reports that Apple is seeking to diversify parts of its semiconductor supply chain to Chinese suppliers and that Meta is seeking to commercialize excess AI computing power. However, industry executives and analysts believe that memory chip supply still lags behind demand. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last month that the shortage of AI memory chips will last for several years due to strong demand, adding that SK Hynix will remain the company's largest supplier of memory chips. UBS also predicts that the global DRAM industry will remain in short supply until at least the second quarter of 2028. Similarly, Bank of America still holds a constructive view on the AI investment cycle, estimating that global capital expenditures by ultra-large-scale enterprises will reach approximately US$851 billion this year and US$1.15 trillion next year, supported by strong cloud service order backlogs, improved AI investment returns, and growing demand for computing-intensive AI applications. Bank of America said the roughly $244 billion raised by very large companies this year largely reflects balance sheet optimization rather than a sign of financing stress, arguing that capital remains abundant to support continued infrastructure investment. In addition, Micron said that due to the surge in demand for memory chips in the AI era and the U.S. government's push to strengthen semiconductor manufacturing, the company plans to invest more than $250 billion in the United States by 2035, higher than the $200 billion investment plan announced last year. (