Samsung’s exhibition stand features the prominent slogan “A new era of mobile agent AI” by the South Korean company Samsung Electronics.
Joanne Crosnull Photo | Getty Images
Shares of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix plunged in early trading Thursday, pushing down South Korea’s benchmark. Kospi This comes after the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index fell overnight.
Samsung Electronics fell more than 7% and SK Hynix tumbled more than 9%, wiping out billions of dollars in market capitalization as Asia’s biggest chipmaker bore the brunt of the global tech stock sell-off.
SK Hynix’s largest shareholder, SK Square, also fell more than 10%, reflecting widening losses across the semiconductor sector.
The decline follows a dismal start to July. Nasdaq This is because investors actively sold semiconductor stocks.
In Wednesday’s session on Wall Street, micron technology Despite rising an impressive 260% year-to-date, the stock has fallen more than 10%. sandisk It also decreases by more than 10% overnight.
Other megacap technology stalwarts, Nvidia and broadcomadded to the decline by between 1% and 2%.
SK Hynix CEO Kwak No-jeong said early Thursday that the company plans to invest 100 trillion Korean won ($64.37 billion) in South Korea, with construction of the M17 manufacturing plant scheduled to begin next year and targeting operation in the first half of 2029 in the country’s central Chungcheong region.
Under this plan, the company will allocate 80 trillion won to the M17 chip manufacturing plant, which will produce NAND flash memory used in storage devices, and 20 trillion won to the P&T7 facility, which aims to expand advanced chip bonding and assembly technology.
“These investments are aimed at meeting the surge in demand for HBM servers and DRAM, enterprise SSDs and NAND as AI services become more popular,” Kwak said at a public briefing in Asan, a city south of Seoul, while outlining SK Hynix’s latest expansion plans.
HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) is an advanced memory chip used in artificial intelligence systems, while DRAM is the main type of memory used in computers and servers. An enterprise solid state drive (SSD) is a storage device designed for data centers.
Kwak also pointed out that SK Group, South Korea’s second-largest conglomerate and owner of SK Hynix, plans to expand its AI data center infrastructure across the country in parallel with its semiconductor production bases.
The CEO explained, “We plan to build AI data centers across the country in stages, starting with an initial capacity of 5 gigawatts (GW) and eventually scaling up to 15 GW.”
The announcement came days after the South Korean government on Monday announced major investment initiatives aimed at supporting the country’s AI ambitions, including plans for Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to invest a combined 800 trillion won as part of the National Semiconductor Ecosystem Project.
SK Hynix also plans to start trading American Depositary Receipts on the Nasdaq market on July 10th.
