"Korea can become a hub for the entire AI supply chain"
Kim Yong-beom, Cheong Wa Dae policy chief, unveiled a national AI industrial strategy he called "Project Trinity" on Wednesday, arguing that South Korea's rare combination of semiconductors, power infrastructure and advanced manufacturing could position it as the backbone of the global AI supply chain — not merely a parts supplier.
Writing on Facebook while accompanying President Lee Jae Myung on a state visit to Italy, Kim described semiconductors, data centers and physical AI as "the three industrial pillars of the AI era."
"These three pipelines are being rewired across the world right now," he said, adding that as the United States, China and Taiwan — each dominant in one of the three sectors — face mounting difficulties, South Korea has a chance to seize new opportunities.
Kim said excelling in only one area limits a country's role: semiconductor strength alone makes it a parts seller, grid capacity alone makes it a server-rental provider, and manufacturing capability alone makes it a contract hardware producer. "The strategic position changes only when all three are connected," he said. "Many companies design AI. But few countries can offer the full supply chain — training AI at scale, supplying the chips and deploying it in the real world. In the AI era, strategic value comes not from the model itself but from providing the infrastructure the model cannot run without."
Kim said the three pillars reinforce one another in a virtuous cycle, giving South Korea a competitive edge. On AI data centers in particular, he said they are "not digital warehouses stacked with servers" but integrated systems where power efficiency, cooling, packaging, memory architecture and network design all work in concert. The more AI infrastructure built domestically, he added, the more opportunities Korean chipmakers gain to test and co-develop next-generation memory chips, packaging and inference chips in real operating environments.
He said AI data centers are better suited to regions outside the greater Seoul metropolitan area — places with surplus power or proximity to generation facilities — and described building data centers as "an act of creating industry."
Kim said a concentrated push to build large-scale AI data centers in South Korea would go beyond infrastructure investment to become a process of building new industrial capabilities. Just as the semiconductor industry cultivated an ecosystem of materials, components and equipment by constructing and operating fabs, data centers could simultaneously lift sectors including cooling, power management, engineering, procurement and construction, operations software and network equipment, he said.
He acknowledged that data centers themselves employ relatively few permanent on-site workers, but said the real value lies in the industries that form around them — construction and engineering firms, cooling and power management suppliers, operations and maintenance providers, and network equipment partners. "When these players put down roots in a region, the data center becomes a hub for local industry and tax revenue rather than a facility that simply consumes power and moves on," he said. Locating data centers outside the greater Seoul area would also ease the concentration of activity in the capital and help plant advanced industrial foundations in regional communities, he added.
moone@heraldcorp.com
