Inside Samsung's Pyeongtaek build-out, where AI memory demand is reshaping chipmaking

Just before noon on a Monday, thousands of construction workers pour out of Samsung's fabs in Pyeongtaek, a farming city south of Seoul where rice paddies meet a chipmaking complex about the size of Central Park. The campus is the world's largest, and it is being expanded for the AI memory boom.

Three fabs already operate around the clock, and a fourth is coming online. Construction of a fifth was halted during the 2024 drop in memory demand but restarted when the AI boom sent demand soaring, according to MIT Technology Review's dispatch from the site.

The reason is structural. Generative AI models run on GPUs, which depend on stacks of specialized memory chips packaged with the processor. As training and inference workloads grow, so does demand for high-bandwidth memory, the component that feeds data to accelerators fast enough to keep them busy.

Samsung expects memory demand to keep surging through 2028. That outlook explains the scale of the Pyeongtaek build-out and the urgency on site, where safety banners and shift schedules reflect a construction program running at full tilt.

The competitive stakes are equally clear. For years Samsung watched its domestic rival SK Hynix pull ahead in the global market for the high-bandwidth memory used in Nvidia's AI accelerators, while TSMC dominated the foundry business. Pyeongtaek is Samsung's attempt to reclaim the memory lead.

The article's ground-level detail shows what that ambition looks like in practice: shuttle buses bringing workers from nearby districts, safety officers overseeing cable-duct crews, and real estate offices fielding inquiries from employees and contractors. One safety officer said she earns 140,000 won, about $97, a day, and expects the boom to keep her busy.

What happens next will depend on execution rather than construction alone. Bringing the fourth fab online and restarting the fifth expands capacity, but Samsung still needs competitive yields and customer wins in high-bandwidth memory to convert that capacity into share.

The broader signal is that AI's physical footprint is expanding. Memory is no longer a commodity sideshow to the GPU story; it is a bottleneck, a cost center and a strategic asset, and Samsung's Pyeongtaek build-out is one of the clearest bets that the demand will last.