South Korea targets Chungcheong with 392 trillion-won AI and semiconductor investment package

South Korea’s industry ministry said an industrywide 392 trillion-won ($252.5 billion) investment package is being directed to the central Chungcheong region, led by Samsung Group and SK hynix plans to expand high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, advanced packaging and memory production as part of the country’s AI-focused semiconductor push.

According to Yonhap, citing the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, Samsung Group pledged 140 trillion won in Chungcheong. The ministry summary said the commitment includes an HBM fabrication plant and packaging facility by Samsung Electronics, display and next-generation display lines by Samsung Display, package-substrate lines by Samsung Electro-Mechanics and an advanced battery factory by Samsung SDI. SK hynix pledged 100 trillion won for a NAND flash fabrication plant and an advanced packaging fab in the region, the ministry summary said.

The package also extends beyond chips. Celltrion pledged 2 trillion won for a biopharmaceutical manufacturing plant in Chungcheong, while other companies committed about 150 trillion won for AI data centers, Yonhap reported. Taken together, the projects underscore the scale of the government-backed effort to turn the region into a broader industrial base spanning semiconductors, data infrastructure and related manufacturing.

The ministry said it will support the pledges with tax incentives, policy financing, one-stop administrative and permitting support, government subsidies and broader measures to build a regional industrial ecosystem, including training, research and development, and recruitment. “The Chungcheong region has long been known as a transportation hub where people, technology and industry converge,” Industry Minister Kim Jung-kwan said, according to Yonhap.

The semiconductor portion is significant because HBM has become one of the most strategically important parts of the memory market in the AI era. HBM is a stacked memory technology used in AI accelerators and AI servers, where speed and bandwidth are critical. Samsung and SK hynix have both been expanding capacity as demand for AI systems has lifted the importance of advanced memory and the packaging technologies needed to assemble high-performance chips. Geographically, the Chungcheong announcement is being presented as a regional follow-up to President Lee Jae Myung’s June 29, 2026, “tripolar mega projects” initiative, which centered on semiconductors, physical AI and AI data centers. Rather than a single-fab announcement, the package points to Seoul’s effort to build a region-based semiconductor and AI supply chain.

At the same time, contemporaneous reporting does not provide a line-by-line accounting of how much of the 392 trillion won reflects direct private capital spending and how much would come through public support, subsidies or incentives, so the total should be understood as the ministry’s package figure rather than a fully itemized corporate capex number. The region had already been emerging as a packaging base: SK hynix said in January it would build its separate P&T7 advanced packaging and testing facility in Cheongju with reported investment of about 19 trillion won and a target for completion by the end of 2027.