Major memory manufacturers in South Korea are accelerating their production expansion, with significant investments flowing into the semiconductor equipment sector.
South Korea's President, Lee Jae-myung, presided over a meeting at the Blue House. The event was attended by Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, who jointly announced a landmark domestic investment plan amounting to nearly 2000 trillion won over the next decade. The core of this plan is to break from the traditional concentration in the capital region and channel massive investments into the southwestern area centered on Jeolla Province. Within this framework, Samsung Electronics plans to select the former Gwangju Air Force Base as the key site for front-end semiconductor wafer fabs, with plans to construct 4-5 facilities. SK Hynix also intends to establish 4-5 front-end wafer fabs in Gwangju. For new semiconductor projects alone, the two giants are expected to invest approximately 600 trillion won each, far exceeding the scale of the previous Yongin cluster in Gyeonggi Province.
Reports indicate that SK Hynix is installing more back-end process equipment at its P&T6 facility in Cheongju, South Korea, making final-stage preparations for the mass production of HBM4. Micron plans to commence operations at its first New York wafer fab by 2030, with its first Idaho fab expected to begin DRAM production in 2027. Samsung has also announced a commitment of up to 110 trillion won to support the development of HBM4 technology.
The expansion by major chip manufacturers directly benefits upstream equipment suppliers.
ASMPT (HKEX: 00522) has announced it has received an additional order from a globally leading integrated device manufacturer (IDM) to supply eight thermal compression bonding (TCB) devices for chip-to-wafer (C2W) applications. As the era of heterogeneous computing increases demand for performance and integration, chiplet-based architectures are becoming increasingly prevalent. These devices will support the IDM in producing advanced client and data center CPUs. A research report from Kaiyuan Securities notes that, according to ASMPT's earnings conference forecast, driven by AI computing chip iterations boosting HBM demand and the penetration of logic chip heterogeneity, the global TCB market is projected to reach approximately $760 million in 2025 and grow to $1.6 billion by 2028, representing a three-year CAGR of 28%. Furthermore, ASMPT delivered its new generation HB equipment to HBM customers in the third quarter of 2025, featuring significant optimizations in alignment and bonding precision, production layout efficiency, and capacity, giving it a competitive edge.
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