Here’s a mind-blowing update from our team at NUPIAO: On June 29, Samsung is set to drop a bombshell on the global stage. We’re talking about a massive 10-year domestic investment plan totaling over 1,000 trillion won (roughly $647.5 billion). To put that insane figure into perspective, this single pledge dwarfs anything Korean companies have ever attempted before. In fact, it’s so huge that it equals more than 30% of South Korea’s entire GDP for 2025.
According to reports we’ve tracked, this announcement will happen live at the “Korea Great Leap Forward Three Super Projects National Report,” held right at the presidential Blue House. President Lee Jae-myung himself is leading the charge, sitting alongside heavyweights like Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won. It’s clear the government is fully backing this mega-mission.
Now, let’s get real about what that 1,000 trillion won actually means. It’s not one giant check written for a single project. Instead, it’s a decade-long roadmap where every Samsung subsidiary—from the electronics giant itself to Samsung SDI and Samsung Display—will pour their resources into cutting-edge industries across the country.
And guess which sector is getting the lion’s share? Semiconductors. Absolutely nothing else matters as much right now. Samsung plans to dump around 300 trillion won into building brand-new wafer fabrication plants in the southwest, specifically targeting Gwangju and Jeollanam-do. The goal? To help the government build the nation’s second-largest semiconductor cluster. If you do the math based on a standard fab costing about 60 trillion won, this budget could fund four or five state-of-the-art factories. That scale is going to rival, if not surpass, their current behemoth in Pyeongtaek.
But wait, there’s more. When it comes to AI data centers, Samsung is expanding its computing power clusters in Chungcheongnam-do, leveraging their storage chip dominance to build the infrastructure needed for the global AI explosion. For energy storage, Samsung SDI is ramping up production lines for next-gen EV and grid batteries. And in the display world, Samsung Display is doubling down on the future with OLEDs and Micro LEDs, ensuring they stay kings of the high-end screen market.
Let’s be honest, the battlefield is tough. As the world’s top memory chip maker, Samsung is locked in a fierce battle against rivals like SK Hynix and TSMC. But with this massive capital injection aimed at expanding capacity and upgrading tech, they are positioning themselves to lock in their lead in both memory and logic chip foundries for years to come.
The financials back this up big time. Samsung Electronics reported operating profits of 43.6 trillion won for 2025. But the real kicker? Q1 2026 profits hit an staggering 57.2 trillion won—a 756% jump year-over-year! Thanks to the insatiable demand for HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), analysts at Goldman Sachs predict Samsung’s 2026 operating profits could skyrocket by over 8 times, pushing Return on Equity (ROE) to a historic 52%. By 2027, revenue from HBM alone is expected to explode to roughly $44 billion.
Looking ahead at the semiconductor boom cycle between 2026 and 2028, experts estimate Samsung’s cumulative operating profits could smash through the 1,500 trillion won mark. From a pure business logic standpoint, investing 1,000 trillion won over the next decade isn’t just possible; it’s a smart move given their cash flow.
Of course, Samsung has done big things before. They announced a 3-year, 180 trillion won national revitalization plan back in August 2018, with 130 trillion going domestically. In 2023, they unveiled a 20-year vision to create the world’s largest semiconductor cluster in Yongin, Hwaseong, and Pyeongtaek. Then, last November, they dropped another 5-year, 450 trillion won plan focusing on AI infrastructure and R&D. But this latest 1,000 trillion won pledge? It blows all previous efforts out of the water in terms of scale, reach, and sheer ambition.
It’s not just Samsung playing the game, either. SK Hynix is currently reviewing a similar plan to build a semiconductor cluster in Honam and Chungcheong regions, covering everything from memory lines to advanced packaging and AI hubs, with investments potentially hitting 400 trillion won. Historically, Korea’s chip manufacturing has been too concentrated around Seoul, leaving other areas behind. That’s why successive Korean governments have been pushing hard for companies to spread their wings beyond the capital, aiming to balance regional development and tackle economic inequality head-on.
