The Reality of the National AI·Semiconductor Grand Strategy Connecting Ulsan-Jeonnam-Gumi-Yongin
SK Group has reconfirmed its policy to execute approximately 128 trillion KRW in domestic investment through 2028 without interruption. Chairman Chey Tae-won's plan goes beyond existing investment intent — evaluated as a grand strategy restructuring the overall framework of AI, semiconductor, energy, and bio industries.
In AI infrastructure, SK Telecom and SK Broadband are building a large-scale "SK AI Data Center" in Ulsan in cooperation with AWS — a hyperscale data center of approximately 100MW scale upon commercial operation in 2027, projected to function as a Northeast Asia AI hub. Jeonnam and Gumi are also seeing full-scale AI infrastructure construction: Samsung SDS is the primary operator of the SPC consortium building the National AI Computing Center in Jeonnam (GPU 15,000 by 2028 providing computing resources to academia/startups/SMEs), and an AI-specialized data center is being established at Gumi Plant 1 supporting Samsung affiliate AI services.
In semiconductors, SK Hynix's HBM demand explosion has caused investment to far exceed initial projections — with industry projections that total investment in the Yongin cluster could reach 600 trillion KRW for 4 fabs. SK Hynix is also building "Trinity Fab" with the government — an open infrastructure enabling domestic semiconductor component companies to test products in actual mass production environments on 12-inch wafer lines, a core platform for strengthening Korea's semiconductor supply chain competitiveness. SK plans to hire 8,000+ new employees annually.
In manufacturing/energy transition, investments focus on solid-state batteries (Samsung SDI, 2027 mass production target, BMW joint demonstration), OLED (Samsung Display, 8.6-gen IT OLED at Asan for tablets/laptops/automotive panels), and semiconductor package substrates (Samsung Electro-Mechanics FC-BGA at Busan for AI accelerators). SK's investment strategy is not simply a corporate growth strategy — it is a national-level transformation where Korea's entire manufacturing industry is building a new industrial paradigm centered on AI-semiconductor-energy, from the AI data center belt connecting Ulsan/Jeonnam/Gumi to the HBM/advanced semiconductor cluster centered on Yongin, next-gen batteries and OLED leading future manufacturing, to supply chain ecosystem strengthening including component companies and large-scale direct/indirect employment expansion.
