South Korea bets $880bn on chips and AI

**Bisi Adipayo** (0:01)
South Korea goes all in on AI, its World Business Express from the BBC World Service, I am Bisi Adipayo. South Korea is investing at least $880 billion to cement its position at the heart of the global chip industry, and Comcast prepares to split off NBCUniversal and Sky in a major, major shakeup.
So, South Korea is planning one of the world's biggest technology investment drives, with companies including Samsung and SK Hynix expected to spend up to 880 billion US dollars over the next decade on AI, semiconductors and data centers. President Lee Jae-myung says the country has no time to lose.

**Jake Hwan** (0:52)
Speed is our only way forward.

**Rachel Winter** (0:54)
We must establish the core building blocks of artificial intelligence faster than any other country.

**Jake Hwan** (1:00)
Semiconductors, physical AI, and AI data centers are the three pillars of our next great leap forward. We need to bring these together and mobilize the combined capabilities of both government and the private sector to build a Korean-style AI ecosystem with speed. To keep pace with explosively growing semiconductor demand, we must rapidly complete the production hubs currently underway and through large-scale new investments in the southwestern region and elsewhere, we must secure overwhelming supply capacity well in advance.

**Bisi Adipayo** (1:35)
Earlier, I spoke to the BBC's Jake Hwan from Seoul.

**Jake Hwan** (1:38)
This is the biggest, probably, a single investment South Korea has ever put out there. And what they're saying is that this is going to put South Korea ahead of its competitions when it comes to what they call the chip war. Half of it is going to go to making new chip making factories. You know, South Korea somehow found itself in the middle of this AI boom. And in order to build these data centers, you need a lot of memory chips. And SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, these two giant chip makers in South Korea, had its windfall. And now South Korea wants to bolster that to build out more capacity. They said they want to double the amount of chip that's being made and build former chip factories in the kind of underdeveloped Southwest region in the coming five years.

**Bisi Adipayo** (2:22)
So is this plain catch up or what really could you say is driving this push now? You said one trillion dollars. That's a huge amount of money.

**Jake Hwan** (2:33)
It is a huge amount of money. I know it's not just the memory chips that are being invested here. They're calling this the three mega projects. And those three are the chips as well as robotics as well as data centers. These are all the kind of components that is expected to be critical in the coming kind of AI revolution. Robotics because they're calling this the physical AI, you know, AI will be the kind of brain and then we'll have a lot of robots that can do a lot of more menial labors and you know, working the factory, et cetera. You know, what South Korea is envisioning is that we're going to be living in a very different world five years, ten years down the line. And if this is a gold rush, South Korea is getting very, very rich selling a lot of pickaxes. And I think a lot of South Korean people are hoping that this trend will continue and South Korea will emerge as a very developed, very rich place where a lot of people will have opportunity and jobs.

**Bisi Adipayo** (3:26)
The BBC's Jake won there. Well, Comcast is shaking up its business and one of the biggest media restructurings in years. The US media giant plans to split into two separately listed companies, NBCUniversal and Sky as it looks to compete more effectively in the streaming era. Rachel Winter is partner and investment manager at Killick and Co.
Rachel, this indeed is a major shaker for Comcast. But why does the company believe it's better of splitting its media assets from the rest of the business?

**Rachel Winter** (3:58)
Well, it's a very big and very complex company and it has lots of different parts. So it's traditionally a broadband company, but then it also has NBC, Sky, Universal Pictures and Universal Theme Parks. And there is a feeling that perhaps different parts of the business will appeal to different types of investor, and that perhaps by having them all together, the company is just not appealing to any investors. And that could be behind the poor share price performance we've had in recent years. And to put that into context, the shares are down about 55 percent in the last five years, whereas the US index, the S&P 500 is up about 70 percent. So the management are hoping that by splitting the company, it will appeal to different types of investors.