Amkor Breaks Ground on Gwangju Chip Expansion, Lifts Plan to 3 Trillion Won

Amkor Technology Korea broke ground Oct. 19 on a chip-packaging expansion in Gwangju, adding a construction milestone to South Korea’s planned semiconductor hub in the country’s southwest.

Amkor plans to invest 3 trillion won in the project from 2026 through 2031 and hire about 2,000 people. That is 2 trillion won more in investment and about 1,000 more jobs than the company outlined in June. The facilities are intended to package chips for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.

The expansion is separate from the memory-chip plants in South Korea’s June plan for four fabs. Samsung Electronics and SK hynix plan two fabs each in the southwest, with a combined 800 trillion won in planned company investment. The four facilities describe the June plan; a later regional briefing raised the possibility of more.

Samsung’s plan includes about 400 trillion won for two fabs in Gwangju as part of a wider 425 trillion-won plan for the Honam region. SK hynix has outlined an approximately 400 trillion-won southwestern semiconductor cluster. A separate SK Group plan calls for a 1-gigawatt artificial intelligence data center in the region.

Another 95 trillion won is planned for infrastructure, including data and computing centers. Power generation, transmission lines and industrial water supplies are also part of the regional plans. The water measures include recycling from dams and sewage systems; those supplies are planned, rather than already in place for the proposed fabs.

South Korea selected the current Gwangju military-airport site for the fab cluster. It targets relocating and temporarily transferring the air-base functions by the second half of 2028. That site is distinct from Amkor’s packaging expansion, which has already broken ground.

“We need a location capable of supporting a large-scale site with stable supplies of electricity and water,” SK hynix President and CEO Kwak Noh-Jung said when the company outlined its southwestern plan in June. The planned utility work and transfer of air-base functions remain steps in preparing the fab site.

Amkor targets the latter half of 2027 for its first two buildings and the first half of 2028 for two others. Mass production is planned to follow their completion.