Inside Samsung's Pyeongtaek campus, where AI demand is driving a memory fab building spree

Samsung is pushing a major expansion of its semiconductor campus in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, and a firsthand dispatch from MIT Technology Review offers a ground-level look at the construction effort being fueled by demand for AI memory chips.

Three fabrication plants at the site already run around the clock, according to the report. A fourth is being brought online, and work on a fifth, which was paused in 2024 during a slump in memory demand, restarted once AI-driven demand took off.

A campus the size of Central Park

The complex sits in a farming city south of Seoul, with rice paddies bordering a chipmaking campus that the report compares in scale to New York City's Central Park. Thousands of workers in black uniforms with sky-blue vests stream out of the fabs at midday, making their way to campus buffets and local beef stew restaurants on foot, scooters and motorcycles. The boom has spilled into the surrounding town: banners advertise short-term studio leases, and real estate offices take inquiries from construction workers at the same counters used by Samsung's salaried engineers.

The memory race behind the buildout

Generative AI models run on GPUs, and those processors rely on stacks of specialized memory packaged alongside them, the kind of chips Pyeongtaek exists to make. Samsung expects memory demand to keep climbing through 2028, MIT Technology Review reports.

The expansion is also a competitive play. Samsung has spent years watching domestic rival SK Hynix pull ahead in the global market for the high-bandwidth memory used in Nvidia's AI accelerators, while Taiwan's TSMC dominates the foundry business of manufacturing chips that other companies design. The report frames the Pyeongtaek buildout as Samsung's attempt to reclaim the lead in memory.

Life on the site

Much of the dispatch follows Choi Hye-rin, a 35-year-old safety officer who commutes by shuttle bus from Songtan, an older district nearby. She supervises a crew building cable ducts, writing reports, inspecting equipment and checking the chemicals her team handles. She is one of hundreds of women working on site, many of them employed as spotters who walk ahead of heavy machinery.

Safety culture is visible everywhere. Banners hung from high steel girders tell crews not to rush even when work runs behind schedule, a giant LED scoreboard announces winners of a safety-poetry contest, and helmets carry stickers pledging that unsafe work will be refused. Choi told MIT Technology Review she earns 140,000 won (about $97) a day, a better rate than other construction jobs, and has no plans to leave, expecting the boom to keep her busy for a long time.

Why it matters

The generative AI surge is usually told through models, GPUs and data centers, but this dispatch is a reminder that it rests on physical infrastructure: fabs, chemicals, cable ducts and the thousands of people who build them. Whether Samsung can close the gap with SK Hynix in high-bandwidth memory will help determine the supply of a component that every AI accelerator depends on. The site's recent history also shows how quickly capital plans can swing: a project frozen during the 2024 memory downturn came back to life almost as soon as AI demand took off.