South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

$585B on new fabs, $357B on AI data centers, and $5.8B on humanoid robots. One of those numbers is not like the others

Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.

The title is kinda misleading. The actual wording is not specific about humanoid robots but "physical AI" which encompasses every machinery that can be potentially integrated with AI, especially focused on mass manufacturing for the Korean case. Basically this project is about all physical infrastructures to automate high tech manufacturing industry.

> Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain

They need a solution to their plummeting birthrates which are officially worse than either China’s or Japan’s

I think there's a reason they're being lumped together. Memory is the reliable industrial bet. Humanoids are the speculative "what will all this AI hardware actually enable?" bet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity:

> The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price.

I'm not aware of many commodities which have only 3 world-wide sellers.

I’d say it’s more like “on groceries and a fancy dinner”. Humanoid robots sure do need RAM, both in data centres for training and in the robots themselves. :)

The value is pretty clear. The problem is the pay off is uncertain.

we will need humanoid robots since nobody makes kids anymore

They had a large memory manufacturer, Infineon, who spun out their memory division as Qimonda which then went bankrupt [1]. They were the 2nd largest in the world at one time apparently. Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.

Japan has an even sadder story. They were the DRAM top dog for a very long time. South Korea entirely ate their lunch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qimonda

> I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train?

My best guess is that the connecting train was operated by the Deutsche Bahn

Realistically, when it comes to the semiconductor market, there aren't many viable options outside of East Asia. I don't mean this in the sense that East Asians were somehow "chosen," but rather that the semiconductor industry inherently requires a large number of highly educated employees working together. The problem is that the working hours inevitably end up being very long. If you actually go work at one of those facilities, you have to wear a "cleanroom suit" (bunny suit), and it's physically demanding. What I'm saying is, you need highly educated personnel who can be mobilized at any time when a problem breaks out in the middle of the night, and who can be hired at relatively low cost. East Asia has a massive educational infrastructure — schools are very large-scale and the system is extremely well-developed — making it hard for other regions to compete. And indeed, the average working hours in countries that do semiconductor manufacturing are extremely long

In other words, it's an industry where you have to grind white-collar workers as if they were blue-collar laborers.

Chip fab locations have traditionally had more political than economic importance. Matrix multiplication chips and RAM have been the recent exception, while TSMC has long been the geopolitical exception. ASML's location only matters to the extent that it gets ordered not to sell to someone.

same thing that happened to Japan/US: they financialized their economy, companies moved from making things to pushing papers and outsourcing the making to China

Not just ASML, but Zeiss the optics company is German and optics are one of the most important parts of lithography.

Regardless there are fabs in Germany, I know of at least 7, most located in Dresden. They mostly focus on older larger nodes, since for the German auto/industrial sectors that is all that is required. It's a much bigger industry than other European nations, especially like the UK which only really has one main fab in Newport.

The AMD spinoff GlobalFoundries has a fab in Dresden.

IIRC Taiwan took a page out of Singapore's playbook and went all in on electrical engineering and adjecent fields. It was very much a long-term strategy. Germany probably didn't feel nearly as much pressure, and was already very strong in all industry.

Intel was supposed to build a fab in Magdeburg, which would have been great, but apparently the reason it was canned (2025) was they couldn't secure enough customers.

> I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train?

Socialism or more its german variant, a system that can spend much more than more capitalistic power holders can ever earn and doesn't really plan well for future. Just look at it - very protected jobs, stifling bureaucracy, very hard to fire people, brilliant folks are definitely not compensated accordingly compared to (below) average peers - more often than not they earn the same. Its not agile economy nor workforce by any means, in contrary.

The feeling that the German Way (TM) is The Right Way, regardless of situation. If it worked in the past, it will in future, right. That leads to stagnation, complacency and when competition leap frogs them by the mile, surprised puzzled looks and wondering how it all happened.

The whole semi manufacturing(/electronics) supply chain moved to Asia in the 1980s.

E.g. Siemens tried to compete but lost back then in the manufacturing part.

apparently bosch semiconductor exists. whatever theyre doing over there they should do more of it tho, I want cheaper ram

Memory has only really recently become lucrative. Germany still has heavy machinery, trains, drilling machines etc all of which will be needed for a long time regardless of whether the "bubble pops" or not.

Siemens?

Germany is done.

The Germany fetish still going strong I see.

if you look at the price per gb of memory, at today's prices its only equal to 2014. People don't complain about memory prices back then. The reality is modern world just need much more memory. Before 8GB memory was enough, today my 32GB memory is 95% used all the time due to chrome. And my 2TB SSD is filled with 4K HDR videos. This is not counting massive storage needs by datasets, AI models, KV caches, and bandwidth needed for LLM inferencing.

it wouldn't be overcapacity in any shape or form

people literally cant give up AI right now and paid thousands of dollar for local AI model

5 years ago people would told you crazy spends 5k on such machine, now ????? people literally encourage you

> Why humanoid? Surely there must be a superior physical form factor than one mimicking human anatomy.

There probably (certainly) is. But if you want to build a multi-purpose platform, you’ll soon be faced with a dumb challenge: nearly all interfaces (door knobs, taps, electric switches, cutlery, sponges, every single button out there, pillow cases, wrenches, hammers, signs…) are made for humans. Placed at human hand level. At human eye level.

Nearly all environments (houses, streets, sidewalks, factory floors, offices, toilets, bathtubs,…) are made for humans. Wide enough and tall enough (or short enough, for bathtubs) to accommodate human bodies.

So until we can find one or more form-factors superior enough to justify we adapt everything around it or them, betting that the easiest way to build a single multi-purpose platform able to do most things (and not n platforms for n+ use cases) is to borrow the shape most things are made for wouldn’t surprise me. Plus, you get a wider market.

And then, once you have happy-ish customers, figure out which of these human attributes and shapes aren’t actually needed to do the job.

There are just a few reasons - humanoid make sense, mostly for multi purpose tasks - where if you want a robot to be multi-job, do almost everything a human can do at work --

If you want a weld you need a 1 arm robot, if a robot to weld, then stack, then push parts on a cart across the factory - then sweep up, then etc.. etc.. perhaps a humanoid is alright.

There will definitely be too many people comfortable with ownership / master relationship with a humanoid robot that will do their bidding.

Human spaces are built for humans. Outdoors cars and quad coppers are a great form but constrained by stars, doors, and low ceiling makes them a poor fit.

Alternatively a 2 foot tall or a 20 foot tall humanoid robots aren’t particularly useful. But a good enough 5-6 foot tall humanoid robot can be swapped into an assembly line wherever a human is currently working without redesigning that workspace.

A lot of training data being collected is coming from people. You have companies paying people to do chores while recording themselves.