Samsung to invest $90 billion in chips and displays in South Korea's Chungcheong region

Samsung Group announced on June 26, 2026 the scale of its decade-long domestic production program: 140 trillion won—approximately $90 billion—will be invested in the North and South Chungcheong regions in central South Korea. Investments will cover the production of displays, memory chips, batteries, and semiconductor packaging materials.

What Samsung will build in Chungcheong

Samsung Display CEO Yi Chun presented a detailed investment plan at a special event in Asan. The event was held under the chairmanship of South Korea's president—a gesture that unambiguously underscored the program's strategic significance for the country's state industrial policy. Four manufacturing directions encompass Samsung's entire value chain:

• Displays — expansion of Samsung Display's capacity for OLED panel production for smartphones, tablets, and televisions; the Asan plant is already the group's largest display manufacturing facility
• Memory chips — increase in production of DRAM, NAND flash, and high-bandwidth HBM memory, which is critical for AI accelerators
• Batteries — production of power cells for consumer electronics and electric vehicles through Samsung SDI
• Chip packaging — advanced semiconductor packaging, including 3D stacking and chiplet architectures for high-performance computing

North and South Chungcheong regions are Samsung's historical manufacturing center. The company built its first factories here in the 1980s, and since then the region has become South Korea's largest industrial cluster with tens of thousands of group employees.

Why Samsung is investing right now

Several factors have converged simultaneously, making 2026 critical for investment decisions. First and foremost—the AI boom. Since 2023, demand for accelerators for training and inference of language models has increased dramatically.

Each Nvidia H100 or GB200 chip requires several stacks of high-bandwidth HBM memory. Samsung has ceded significant market share to competitor SK Hynix—and is now aggressively investing to recover its position. The second factor is geopolitics.

The US subsidizes factory construction through the CHIPS Act, Japan attracts TSMC and Micron with state grants, and the EU is implementing the European Chips Act. Major customers are actively diversifying their supply chains, and Samsung is forced to demonstrate long-term commitments to domestic manufacturing facilities. The third factor is technological pace.

The transition to finer process nodes, mastering the next generation of flash memory, and updating display production lines require capital investments that cannot be delayed without losing competitiveness.

The presence of the country's president at the presentation is not just protocol. The South Korean government regards the semiconductor industry as a national security priority and is willing to support it through subsidies, tax breaks, and protective instruments.

What this means for AI infrastructure

The HBM memory shortage in 2024–2025 became one of the key constraints for accelerator manufacturers: Nvidia and other vendors could not increase GPU shipments precisely due to insufficient HBM capacity. Samsung's expansion of production directly affects the availability and cost of AI accelerators in the 2027–2030 horizon. Investments in chip packaging are also important: the chiplet architecture technologies being implemented by AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm require precision packaging available from only a few global manufacturers.

What this means

140 trillion won over a decade is one of the largest private investment commitments in the history of Korean industry. Samsung sends the market a clear signal: despite competition from TSMC, SK Hynix, and new players from Japan and the US, the company intends to remain an anchor supplier of semiconductor components for AI infrastructure for the next decade.