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South Korean President Moon Jae-in holds a joint press conference with US President Joe Biden on Friday at the White House after their first in-person summit. (Yonhap News)

Out of the US$39.4 billion in planned US investment announced by South Korea’s top four business groups during the recent South Korea-US summit, Samsung Electronics accounted for the largest share at US$17 billion.

During a Thursday business roundtable the day before the summit, Samsung Electronics Co-Vice Chairman Kim Ki-nam, who was attending as part of a visiting business delegation, said the company was “planning for foundry [commissioned semiconductor production] investment.”

Kim did not share specifics on what kinds of investments would be made where. He only said his company would be “providing proactive support to the IT industry to establish a crucially important semiconductor supply chain” and “seeking a way forward through innovation while growing together with US businesses.”

Many in the semiconductor industry are predicting Samsung Electronics will build an additional factory in Austin. The attitude among Samsung insiders read along similar lines.

“The first factory currently operating in Austin is an older model, and everyone is predicting that a newly built second factory will end up being a foundry line for the latest [extreme ultraviolet lithography] technology, which is a system semiconductor area,” a Samsung Electronics source said Sunday.

Since 1997, Samsung Electronics has been opening its Austin factory as its only foundry facility in the US. It has already acquired a site measuring around 3.3 million square meters (81,544 acres) near its existing factory, and it submitted a letter of intent to invest to the Texas state government and took part in negotiations before its latest investment plan announcement.

Shortly before the summit, Reuters reported that Samsung Electronics had decided to build a 5-nanometer extreme ultraviolet lithography foundry production line in Austin, adding that it “could begin construction [. . .] in the third quarter of this year with a target to be operational in 2024.”

Hyundai Motor previously announced plans to invest US$7.4 billion through 2025 in future mobility areas such as electric vehicle (EV) production and charging infrastructure expansions in the US. Those plans were reaffirmed at the latest event.

LG Energy Solution plans to invest US$10 billion through 2025 in areas that include a battery plant to be established in Tennessee as a joint venture with the US automaker General Motors (GM). According to an announcement by LG before the summit, the Tennessee factory site is to begin construction within the year in Spring Hill and begin mass production by the second half of 2023.

Together with another factory in Ohio that is already under construction as the two companies’ first joint venture, it is to produce over one million batteries per year to supply to next-generation GM EVs.

SK is pursuing investment in the areas of semiconductors, batteries and biotechnology. SK Innovation plans to build a battery plant in Georgia in partnership with Ford. The joint venture is expected to begin production in the mid-2020s on 60 gigawatt-hours per year in EV battery cells and modules in the US.

The new investment by SK amounts to around US$3 billion. SK Innovation is currently building a first and second battery factory in Georgia.

SK Hynix plans to invest US$1 billion to establish a large-scale R&D center in the Silicon Valley for innovation in new growth areas such as artificial intelligence.

By Kim Young-bae, senior staff writer

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