PPP lawmaker questions whether Samsung-SK Hynix Honam investment plan is national strategy or party politics

People Power Party lawmaker Yoon Sang-hyun questioned Wednesday whether a proposed semiconductor cluster investment in the Honam region by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix amounts to a national strategy or a campaign pledge for an upcoming party convention. His remarks came after Cheong Wa Dae policy chief Kim Yong-beom said Tuesday that "discussions on a new semiconductor cluster centered on the Honam and Chungcheong regions are in the final stages."

Writing on his Facebook page Wednesday, Yoon said plans for what he called a "Samsung-SK Hynix Honam investment" were gaining momentum, with investment in the semiconductor sector alone being discussed at a scale of hundreds of trillions of won. "Semiconductors are not an industry that moves according to a party convention schedule," he said.

Yoon described the project as a national undertaking requiring hundreds of trillions of won in capital, ultra-high-voltage power grids, hundreds of thousands of tons of ultrapure water per day, thousands of partner companies, and tens of thousands of engineers and researchers. "Yet the fact that Cheong Wa Dae and the ruling camp are stepping forward directly to discuss the location raises concern that the future of national industry is being driven by political logic rather than industrial logic," he said.

He added that the semiconductor industry typically takes more than seven years just to evaluate a factory site, a process conducted in strict secrecy while weighing multiple factors. "Once the process becomes public, land prices rise and actual implementation becomes impossible," he said. Yoon also noted that building a single nuclear power plant takes more than a decade. "Announcing the factory site first and saying the power issue will be resolved later is like picking a plot of land before drawing up the blueprints," he said.

"The biggest problem is power," Yoon said. "The semiconductor industry is in effect an industry that converts electricity into semiconductors, and advanced fabs cannot tolerate even a single power outage, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Solar and wind have value as supplementary power sources, but they cannot serve as the baseload power needed to sustain an entire advanced semiconductor cluster."

He said stable power generation facilities and ultra-high-voltage transmission networks are ultimately essential, adding that securing talent, technology and a partner-company ecosystem are also critical. "Yet the political world is trying to decide industrial locations as if drawing circles on a map," he said.

Yoon said the timing was what concerned him most. "The Democratic Party has its party convention coming up in August. It is precisely at this moment that the Honam semiconductor cluster idea has surged to the fore," he said.

He said this was why analysts were asking whether the Democratic Party — which had pushed a "semiconductor Honam relocation" platform during the local elections — was again playing the Honam card ahead of its convention. "Whether it is Honam, Chungcheong or Yeongnam, the location of a national strategic industry must be decided according to objective criteria — power, water, talent and industrial ecosystem — not political considerations," he wrote. "National strategic industries must be decided by industrial logic, not a political timetable."