Samsung, SK to Cement Memory Leadership Through 2031

*Editor's Note: 'AI PRISM' (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an "AI-based customized news recommendation and summary service" developed with support from the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six customized news items by reader type.

1. Korea to Remain Memory Powerhouse Through 2031

- Key Summary: A forecast has emerged that Korea will maintain its position as the world's strongest player in the memory chip market through 2031. French market research firm Yole Group assessed that the Korean government is pursuing a plan to double wafer production within five years, and that investment by leading companies such as Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and SK hynix (000660.KS) is continuing. Amid the fallout from US semiconductor regulations, the consumption landscape appears to be realigning, with the US share of memory chip consumption rising and China's declining. Accordingly, the market is transitioning from learning-centered AI 1.0 to inference-centered AI 2.0, and Nvidia's high-bandwidth memory (HBM) share is also expected to decline as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) proliferate.

2. Musk: Demand Surges 200% While Production Rises 20%, Memory Prices to Rise

- Key Summary: Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, rebutted the memory peak theory, saying that memory chip production increases 20% each year while demand surges more than 200%. He pointed out that memory is the constraint on AI and stressed that it is a basic principle of economics that prices rise when demand grows faster than supply. On the same day, AMD said data center revenue more than doubled year-on-year to $6.72 billion, and its third-quarter revenue forecast also exceeded market expectations. SpaceX also posted revenue of $7.8 billion, up 92% from a year earlier, in its first earnings report after going public, but its shares fell more than 7% in after-hours trading as the sixfold surge in AI-sector capital expenditure was highlighted.

3. Big Tech's Hidden Debt Approaches $100 Billion

- Key Summary: The scale of long-term lease contracts signed by the five largest US Big Tech companies — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — to secure data centers that has not yet been recognized as accounting liabilities was found to reach $1.09 trillion (about 1,560 trillion won). This is about four times the $285 billion already recognized as lease liabilities. According to Reuters, Oracle's undisclosed lease scale is the largest at $260 billion, about seven times its current lease liabilities. Big Tech companies are continuing their investments in the belief that AI demand will surge over the long term, but there are warnings that they could face enormous lease cost burdens if demand falls short of expectations.

4. Selling Products Alone Reaches Survival Limits — Seizing Tech Standards Through 'Baotuan Chuhai'

- Key Summary: Chinese companies are expanding what is called the "baotuan chuhai" (going overseas in groups) strategy, in which they establish not only factories but also parts, logistics, and information technology (IT) facilities in emerging markets such as Thailand. As profitability slows due to falling export prices and US tariff policy, they are analyzed to be seeking to transform their revenue structure through exports of manufacturing platforms such as the industrial internet (smart factories). According to China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the added value of industries applying the industrial internet increased 28.4% over four years, and the Chinese government also announced a policy to secure leadership in global standards in its 15th Five-Year Plan. Experts assessed that the spread of the industrial internet could broaden the application scope of Chinese technology standards and expand China's influence in global manufacturing through lock-in effects.

5. Bessent: Yen Intervention Blocks Spread of Asian Currency Weakness

- Key Summary: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the yen-buying intervention coordinated with the Japanese government was a measure to prevent weakness from spreading across Asian currencies. He noted that the late-1990s Asian financial crisis was triggered by a sharp yen depreciation, pointing out that the Korean won and Chinese yuan are also affected by yen weakness. The US Treasury previously designated Korea, Japan, and China as currency monitoring list countries in its earlier exchange rate report. Meanwhile, Secretary Bessent remarked that the Abenomics phase has ended and the era of Takaichinomics has begun, and controversy has arisen over the plan announced by the US Treasury and Japan to utilize the Foreign and International Monetary Authorities (FIMA) repo facility, with claims that it infringes on the independence of the Federal Reserve (Fed).

6. From AIDC and Robots to Solar Materials — US Erases China From Advanced Supply Chains

- Key Summary: The United States is rolling out a series of export control measures to exclude China from advanced supply chains, including artificial intelligence (AI) data center components, robots, and solar and semiconductor materials. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is preparing legislation to ban imports of Chinese-made optical transceivers, and the Trump administration is also considering price floors and tariffs on solar panels and polysilicon, a key semiconductor material. In response, China has also countered by strengthening its review of exports to the US of domestically made drone components and related technology. Analysts say the aim is also to strengthen its negotiating leverage ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to the US next month.