South Korea rolled out sweeping chip and AI mega-projects on Monday, as President Lee Jae Myung pledged to cement overwhelming industry leadership with investments spanning hundreds of billions of dollars over several years.
The announcement marks Lee’s boldest push yet to align South Korea’s AI and chip ambitions with his pledge to narrow regional disparities and revive economies beyond the Seoul metropolitan area.
Lee was joined by the leaders of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the world’s two largest memory chipmakers, for the televised announcement.
“We must secure the core elements of AI faster than any other country,” Reuters quoted the president as saying. “Semiconductors, physical AI, and AI data centers are the triple axis for our great leap forward.”
The projects are expected to attract investments including by Samsung and SK over the next several years. Lee said the country’s southwestern city of Gwangju and South Jeolla province will also invest 520 trillion won ($336.70 billion) in the projects.
As part of the overall initiative, the southwest would be the home to new massive chip production clusters, Lee said, in part to utilize the rich power resources yet untapped there.
Local media have reported the planned investments could exceed 1,000 trillion won ($651.41 billion) over coming years.
Google has put limits on Meta’s use of its Gemini AI models after the social media company sought more computing capacity than the rival tech group could provide, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
Google, owned by Alphabet, told Meta around March it could not meet the full Gemini capacity the company had sought to purchase, the newspaper said, adding that the shortfall disrupted and delayed some of Meta’s internal AI projects.
Several other Google clients have also been affected, though to a lesser extent, according to the report. Meta has been particularly impacted due to its exceptionally high demand for Google’s models, the FT said.
Reuters could not immediately verify the report, which cited people familiar with the matter. Google and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside business hours.
Due to the restrictions, Meta has encouraged staff to be more efficient with AI tokens, the units that measure AI usage, the FT report said.
Even as companies continue to spend billions on chips and data centers, they are still struggling to secure enough computing power to support the growing demand for AI services.
Revenue at Google Cloud grew to $20 billion in the first quarter ended March, but CEO Sundar Pichai said computing power constraints prevented even higher growth and contributed to the cloud unit’s backlog nearly doubling quarter on quarter.
Many social media users in Venezuela have reported receiving alerts on Android smartphones moments before Wednesday’s quake with almost 600 confirmed dead.
Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, both include the option to display government alerts for emergencies like earthquakes.
But the search giant last year also detailed its system that uses the billions of Android smartphones worldwide to detect earthquakes in the first place.
– How it works –
Almost all smartphones contain an accelerometer, a movement sensor used for tasks like flipping the screen when users turn it sideways.
That same sensor “can also detect the ground shaking from an earthquake,” Google wrote in a July 2025 blog post.
Accelerometers can spot potential earthquakes’ fast-moving initial “P” wave, sending information about the tremor to a Google server.
By rapidly cross-referencing many such reports, the system can “confirm that an earthquake is happening and estimate its location and magnitude,” Google said.
“The goal is to warn as many people as possible before the slower, more damaging S-wave of an earthquake reaches them”.
Google offers two stages of alerts.
“BeAware” warns of weaker tremors, while for the heaviest quakes, “TakeAction” takes over the screen and plays a loud sound even when the phone is on silent mode.
– How effective is the system? –
Google said last year that its systems had already sent 790 million alerts to individual phones, warning of over 2,000 potentially dangerous earthquakes detected from April 2021.
While that gives many more people than before access to early warning information, there have been hiccups.
Android phones failed to sound warnings ahead of devastating February 2023 earthquakes that killed almost 60,000 people across Türkiye and Syria.
Google said last year that it has since updated its algorithms to avoid a repeat.
The company also apologized in February 2025 for a false alarm sent to some Android users in Brazil.
This week in Venezuela, hundreds of people have posted praise for Google on X, with some including unverified videos of alerts prompting people to leave buildings.
– What about Apple? –
Beyond government warnings, Apple says on its website that users in the US and Taiwan can also receive alerts from other “alert originators” about earthquakes.
The company did not respond to AFP’s questions about how that system works by time of publication.
Neither has the iPhone giant enlisted its users’ phones for a distributed detection system like Google’s.
The hundreds of millions of iPhones around the globe are, however, able to forward alerts they receive to other nearby Apple devices that do not have mobile reception or a WiFi connection — potentially helping life-saving warnings to get through.
South Korea’s Samsung Electronics is expected to announce a record domestic investment plan next week, according to local media reports, in a massive bet on AI-driven semiconductor demand.
The 1,000 trillion won ($650 billion) package, to be announced by the chip giant and the government, is in line with President Lee Jae Myung’s agenda for development in regions outside of the capital Seoul.
Lee will host a “National Mega Project” briefing on Monday, where Samsung will unveil major long-term investment plans, the reports said.
Rival chipmaker SK hynix is also expected to announce spending plans at the same event.
Both companies are top producers of advanced memory chips used in the data centers that train and run artificial intelligence tools like chatbots and image generators.
The AI boom has sent the firms’ profits and share prices skyrocketing, with Samsung recently agreeing a bonus deal with its workers’ union to avert a major strike.
The Samsung investment package is expected to include about 300 trillion won for a new semiconductor complex in southwest South Korea — one of the regions that has fallen behind the capital in tech investment.
Some 60 trillion won would likely be earmarked for six chip manufacturing plants at Yongin in the south, and more than 350 trillion won for AI infrastructure including data centers, according to Maeil Business Newspaper.
The proposed 10-year spending package would be the largest investment commitment ever announced by a South Korean company, AFP reported.
Lee met Samsung chairman Lee Jae-yong in Seoul this week to discuss semiconductor investments, according to news reports.
The president also reportedly met SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won last week.
Samsung Electronics last year posted an operating profit of 43.6 trillion won — a 33 percent increase year-on-year.
The company is projected to achieve an operating profit in the mid-to-high 300 trillion won range this year, and 550 trillion won next year.
Kim Yong-beom, the presidential chief of staff for policy, said Wednesday that discussions on the planned semiconductor project in Yongin were in their final stages.
“Once everything is confirmed, we plan to bring together the companies and relevant ministries to explain the plan to the public at once,” Kim said.
