Samsung Electronics broke ground on Thursday on a high bandwidth memory chip packaging plant at its Onyang campus in Asan, South Korea, an investment of 6 trillion won, about $4.48 billion. Speaking at the ceremony, President Lee Jae Myung said the plant would be followed by about 40 trillion won, about $30 billion, of investment in advanced equipment.
The two figures are different kinds of money and are kept separate here. The 6 trillion won is Samsung’s plant construction investment, part of the investment plans Samsung affiliates announced in July. The roughly 40 trillion won is equipment spending the president said would follow; Samsung has not committed it on the same terms, and no timeline or allocation for it was given at the ceremony.
Samsung said in its presentation that the new HBM production line is scheduled to begin operations in June 2028, a year earlier than initially planned, as the company seeks to meet rapidly growing demand for server memory. The plant will have three floors of clean room space covering about 31,000 square metres.
The groundbreaking sits inside a deliberate state programme. South Korea’s government has tapped Samsung, SK Hynix and other companies to drive mega projects covering semiconductors, physical artificial intelligence and AI data centres, and the Asan plant is the first construction step of Samsung’s share. Pulling a packaging line forward by a full year signals where Samsung sees the shortage: not in wafer supply, but in the packaging capacity that turns memory into AI ready HBM stacks.