South Korea anticipates its DRAM production capacity will double within five years, while the global memory market is projected to expand fourfold in the same timeframe.

On June 29, the South Korean government announced plans to construct approximately four chip factories in the southwestern region, involving an investment of about 800 trillion won. Over the next 15 years, the country will invest at least 30 trillion won in next-generation memory, edge artificial intelligence, defense, and other chip sectors. Officials stated the goal is to double DRAM production capacity within five years, with the global memory market expected to quadruple in size over the same period.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and SK Hynix Inc are also set to unveil substantial investment plans on the same day. It is estimated that these two major memory companies' investments over the next ten years could exceed 1,000 trillion won (approximately 4.4243 trillion yuan).

A senior industry insider indicated that South Korea's leading DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) companies will ramp up investments, with SK Hynix Inc's DRAM investment expected to double.

From a corporate perspective, SK Hynix Inc plans to list American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) on Nasdaq on July 10. In a June 24 announcement, the company stated it would issue ADRs worth up to 45.45 trillion won (approximately 200.1 billion yuan). The raised funds will be used for the first-phase wafer fab in the Yongin semiconductor cluster, the Cheongju P&T7 advanced packaging plant construction, and equipment investments.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd's sixth-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM4) achieved sales exceeding $1 billion in just over four months this year. Sales are projected to surpass $1.2 billion by the end of June. On June 23, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd also launched its Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 5.0 solution, with mass production scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter.

Over the past week, share prices of South Korea's leading memory chip firms and the main stock index experienced a rally followed by a pullback. As of around noon on June 29, shares of Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and SK Hynix Inc continued their downward correction, falling 5.15% to 322,000 won per share and 3.85% to 2,570,000 won per share, respectively. The benchmark KOSPI index dropped 2.02% to 8,241.14 points.

Amid rising memory prices, a US investment bank forecasts that the total capital expenditure for a single AI computing data center could increase by 30% by 2027. While sustained price increases for memory chips are boosting upstream profitability, downstream cloud providers are facing declining returns on investment. Market concerns are growing over whether cloud providers can recoup their investments later and if they might reduce long-term memory procurement contracts.

Currently, the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) large language models continues to drive the trend of computing power development and growing memory demand. Sigmaintell estimates global DRAM demand will reach approximately 40 billion gigabytes by 2026, with overall industry demand maintaining growth of over 20%. Capacity expansion on the supply side still lags behind demand, making it premature to declare a turning point in the supply-demand balance for DRAM and NAND flash memory.