South Korea Plans Approximately KRW 800tn Investment to Build Four Chip Fabs in Southwest Region, with Samsung and SK Hynix Each to Build Two
On June 29, South Korea’s Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy Kim Jung-kwan said that four chip fabs are expected to be built in the country’s southwest region, with total investment of approximately KRW 800tn, equivalent to around RMB 4.2tn. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix each plan to build two fabs. At the same time, the South Korean government said investment in the semiconductor sector over the next 15 years is expected to reach at least KRW 30tn, covering areas including next-generation memory, edge AI, and defense applications. Under the plan, the central region will focus on advanced packaging, while the southeast region will develop semiconductor materials, components, equipment, and next-generation power semiconductor clusters. Investment in the chip packaging cluster in the Chungcheong region is expected to reach KRW 81tn.
Company Trend(June 23)
Kuaishou Chip Unit Lingchuan Technology Achieves Commercial Breakthrough in In-House AI Compute Chips
Kuaishou has spun off its internal chip division into an independent entity, Lingchuan Technology, which has completed a Series A+ funding round raising several hundred million RMB, marking a full transition of its self-developed chip business toward independent market-oriented operations. Lingchuan Technology was formally established as an independent company in March 2024, jointly controlled by Kuaishou and a Beijing AI fund, focusing on the development of dedicated compute chips for video processing and multimodal large models. Its flagship mature product SL200 has shipped nearly 100,000 units, covering 99.7% of Kuaishou’s live-streaming transcoding workloads and supporting video traffic for approximately 700 million platform users. The chip is also supplied to external customers including Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Cloud, and Bilibili. The SL200 has reportedly won international video encoding competitions for three consecutive years, delivering higher compression efficiency than comparable Nvidia solutions while reducing compute energy consumption by approximately 30%. A next-generation fully domestic 3D-stacked chip completed tape-out in April 2026. The new funding will be used for product iteration, capacity expansion of existing chips, and overseas market development. Leveraging its internet-scale application scenarios, Lingchuan Technology is also deploying hardware solutions including AI acceleration cards and integrated compute appliances, targeting use cases in intelligent computing, security, and automotive applications. The company is emerging as a key domestic supplier in China’s vertical video compute chip segment.
Company Trend(June.16)
TSMC and Amkor Sign Ten-Year Agreement: Arizona Advanced Packaging Partnership Targets AI Capacity Bottlenecks
On June 16, TSMC, the world’s leading foundry, and Amkor Technology, the world’s second-largest outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) provider, announced that they had entered into a ten-year strategic partnership agreement.