Inside Samsung's Massive Pyeongtaek Chip Complex, Where AI Demand Fuels a Building Boom

Samsung operates three semiconductor fabs around the clock in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, has a fourth coming online, and has restarted construction of a fifth that it halted in 2024 — all to feed the AI industry's hunger for memory chips.

MIT Technology Review visited the site, a sprawling chipmaking complex in a farming city south of Seoul where rice paddies sit next to clean-room buildings. The campus covers an area about the size of New York City's Central Park. It's Samsung's bid to reclaim the lead in a market it has been losing.

Why is Samsung building so much, so fast?

Generative AI models run on powerful chips known as GPUs. Those GPUs depend on stacks of specialized memory chips packaged with the processor. More AI means more memory, and Samsung predicts that demand for memory chips will continue to surge through 2028.

The stakes are competitive, not just technical. For years, Samsung watched its domestic rival SK Hynix pull ahead in the global market for the high-bandwidth memory models that power Nvidia's AI accelerators. Meanwhile, the Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC has dominated the foundry business, manufacturing chips that other companies design. The Pyeongtaek build-out is Samsung's attempt to reclaim its lead on memory chips.

The construction history tells the story of the market's whiplash. Samsung halted work on the fifth fab during a drop in demand for memory chips in 2024. Then the AI boom sent demand soaring, and the cranes started moving again.

In short: the complex is a physical record of how quickly AI demand reversed the memory market's fortunes.

Who actually builds it?

It's just before noon on a Monday, and construction workers pour out of Samsung's fabs. Thousands of them, dressed head to toe in black with sky-blue vests, take off helmets bearing their names and fab numbers.

They walk to lunch, sweaty and flushed, in chunky sneakers capped with yellow rubber toe guards. Some hop on scooters or motorcycles to get around the campus. They dine at buffets, diners, and beef stew joints, walking past banners advertising short-term leases for studio apartments. Some stop by real estate offices to inquire, stepping up to the same counters where Samsung's salaried engineers buy new homes.

In front of the fourth fab, MIT Technology Review met Choi Hye-rin, a 35-year-old safety officer, as she wiped her forehead with a handkerchief. At dawn, she boarded one of the shuttle buses that ferry workers in from Songtan, an older, scrappier district. She oversees the safety of a crew responsible for building cable ducts. She writes reports, inspects equipment, and checks the chemicals the workers handle. She's one of hundreds of women working on site, many employed as spotters who walk ahead of heavy equipment.

The workforce is large enough to reshape the local economy — housing, food, and real estate all now orbit the fab complex.

What does safety look like on a site this size?

Safety is a big deal here. After lunch, construction picks right back up. Excavators move past rust-red steel structures rising high under tower cranes.

The site's culture shows up in its signage. Banners that hang from the highest girders read, "Even if the work runs late, don't rush." A giant LED scoreboard announces the winners of a contest for writing a poem about safety. Helmets stickered with a pledge — "I will not work if it's not safe" — perch atop lockers. The finished fabs glisten from across the street.

Along with the cautionary messages, there's a sense of urgency in the air. Samsung is racing a market window it expects to stay open through 2028, and every fab that comes online late is capacity ceded to SK Hynix.

What do the workers say?

Although the heat can be brutal and the work zones are crowded, Hye-rin has no plans to leave. "The rate here is higher than other construction sites, and the work is relatively easy," she says.

She gets paid 140,000 won ($97) a day. And she expects the boom to keep her busy for some time: "You just keep coming back."

That daily wage is the concrete number under the abstraction of "AI demand" — a construction worker in a rice-paddy city outside Seoul earning $97 a day because GPUs need stacked memory chips.

What happens next?

The fourth fab comes online while the fifth rises behind it. Samsung's bet is that AI-driven memory demand holds through 2028, long enough to pay for one of the largest chipmaking complexes in the world — and to close the gap that SK Hynix opened in high-bandwidth memory for Nvidia's accelerators.