South Korea Bets $880 Billion on AI, Chips, and Robots in a Decade-Long National Plan

South Korea has placed one of the largest national bets on artificial intelligence any country has ever made. In late June, President Lee Jae-myung unveiled a ten-year plan worth roughly 1,350 trillion won — about $880 billion — organized around what the government calls a "triple axis" of semiconductors, physical AI, and data centers. It is less an industrial policy than a national wager that the next decade of economic power will be decided by who owns the compute stack, from the silicon up.

The semiconductor pillar is the heaviest. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix — the world's two largest memory chipmakers — will invest around 800 trillion won ($518 billion), together with their suppliers, to build two new fabrication sites each in the country's southwest. Much of that spending is concentrated in the Honam region, hundreds of kilometers from Seoul, with the city of Gwangju and South Jeolla Province committing 520 trillion won ($336.7 billion) of their own. The geographic choice is deliberate: it spreads the AI buildout — and the jobs — beyond the capital and into regions the government wants to revitalize.

The second pillar is power and place: roughly $550 billion earmarked for AI data centers, with a target of 8.4 gigawatts of data-center capacity by 2029. That figure is the tell. As every frontier lab has discovered this year, the binding constraint on AI is no longer just chips but the electricity and physical infrastructure to run them — the same shortage that has Google rationing Gemini access and Anthropic signing multi-billion-dollar data-center leases. Korea is trying to build that capacity as sovereign infrastructure rather than rent it.

The third pillar is robotics, where the ambition is blunt: lift Korea's share of the global humanoid robot market from about 1 percent today to 20 percent by 2028. Pairing "physical AI" with the country's manufacturing base is a bid to turn its industrial strength — shipbuilding, autos, electronics — into an advantage as embodied AI moves from labs into factories and logistics. It also slots neatly alongside the chip and data-center pillars: robots are compute-hungry customers for exactly the silicon and power Korea plans to build.

For Bloomberg and others, the plan reads as President Lee tying his political legacy to the national chip boom, and the risks are real — $880 billion is a staggering sum to deploy on schedule, demand forecasts can shift, and building 8.4 gigawatts of data centers means finding the power to match. But the strategic logic is hard to miss. With the United States, China, and the EU all treating AI infrastructure as a matter of national security, Korea is betting that the countries which control chips, power, and robots will set the terms for everyone else — and it is spending like it believes that.