Samsung Group has put a number on its next decade of domestic manufacturing: 140 trillion won, or roughly $90 billion, spread across displays, memory chips, batteries and chip-packaging materials in South Korea’s central Chungcheong provinces.
Samsung Display chief executive Yi Chung laid out the breakdown on Thursday at an event in Asan hosted by President Lee Jae Myung, part of a broader push the government has billed as a tripolar mega project for AI-era industry.
The largest single piece goes to Samsung Display, which will spend 67 trillion won expanding OLED production in Asan, covering panels for phones, tablets, extended-reality headsets, cars and humanoid robots.
Samsung Electronics follows with 56 trillion won earmarked for Onyang and Cheonan, turning both sites into production bases for high-bandwidth memory, the chip category that has become central to Nvidia’s AI accelerators and, by extension, to Samsung’s recent run of AI-driven profit.
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Samsung SDI adds 9 trillion won for what the company calls a mother-line testbed in Cheonan, meant to verify next-generation battery technology, including dry-electrode processes, before the methods are exported to its plants worldwide.
Samsung Electro-Mechanics rounds out the package with 8 trillion won for Sejong, where it plans to expand production of the FC-BGA package substrates that go into AI server chips, capacity aimed squarely at the North American big-tech demand driving the current memory boom, alongside local hiring and research and development.
Taken together, the four Samsung units are betting that Chungcheong can do for materials and packaging what Pyeongtaek and Hwaseong already do for chip fabrication: concentrate a supply chain in one place so that a customer building an AI server can source memory, substrates, batteries and displays from within a single Korean region.
Samsung Electronics chairman Jay Y. Lee, who attended the briefing alongside President Lee, framed the investment as existential rather than opportunistic.
“The success or failure of the AI era depends on the materials and components that power AI, and this is directly linked to Samsung’s future,” he said, according to Seoul Economic Daily’s translation of his remarks, adding that Samsung would make an “all-out effort to help Korea leap forward as an industrial powerhouse.”
President Lee used the same event to make a larger claim about the region itself, describing Chungcheong as a future hub tying together semiconductors, displays, batteries and biotech into what he called, elsewhere that day, a “Korean Silicon Valley.”
Samsung’s pledge sat alongside a parallel one from SK hynix, which is separately investing in a Cheongju chip plant, and from Celltrion; together, the companies detailed a combined 392 trillion won, or about $252.5 billion, for the province, according to the Korea Times.
Not everyone welcomed the framing. Critics have accused the Lee administration of pressuring conglomerates into these commitments to shore up political support ahead of the ruling Democratic Party’s national convention in August, a charge the president rejected on the day as “an impossible story,” arguing that Korean firms compete globally rather than domestically and have no room for symbolic gestures.
The Chungcheong pledge follows Samsung’s own earlier disclosure of a decade-long, economy-wide investment plan running into the hundreds of trillions of won, of which this regional package forms one part.
It also comes only weeks after Samsung’s chip workforce secured a bonus formula tied to semiconductor profits, following a standoff with its union that had threatened strike action, a reminder that the same AI demand fuelling this investment has also been reshaping labour relations inside the company.
Samsung has not published a construction timeline for the Chungcheong sites, and the government has yet to detail what regulatory support, if any, will accompany the private capital.
For a company whose chairman just called this a decisive moment for the country’s industrial future, the absence of a published schedule is the one gap in an otherwise heavily choreographed announcement.
