Taiwan's share of Korea's chip exports doubles as Nvidia-TSMC-Samsung supply chain solidifies

South Korea's supply chain map is shifting rapidly as AI spreads and global supply chains are reorganized. Surging semiconductor demand has sharply lifted the share of exports going to Taiwan, while the share headed to China — long the country's top export destination — has fallen steeply.

The Bank of Korea laid out those findings Monday in a report titled "Map of Major Manufacturing Production and Supply Chains in Korea."

The report covers 11 major manufacturing sectors and visualizes three dimensions: regional production trends, exports broken down by destination country and product category, and the structure of raw material and intermediate goods imports needed for production.

"As the global industrial environment has shifted in recent years due to the spread of AI, the growth of Chinese manufacturing, the tightening of protectionism and the expansion of eco-friendly regulation, Korea's manufacturing production and trade structure has also been rapidly reorganized," the Bank of Korea said.

Rising demand for AI semiconductors has driven a particularly large increase in chip exports to Taiwan. Taiwan accounted for 9 percent of Korea's semiconductor exports in 2022, ranking fourth among all export destinations, but its share climbed to 19.9 percent last year, pushing it up to second place.

China retained its top position in semiconductor export share since 2022, but both its share (53.1 percent to 40.3 percent) and export value ($75.81 billion to $74.46 billion) declined.

Jeong Seong-yeop, head of the Bank of Korea's regional research support team, said the shift reflects the consolidation of a global AI semiconductor supply chain anchored by US-based Nvidia, Taiwan's TSMC, and Korea's Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. "Semiconductor demand has moved away from central processing units and DRAM toward GPUs and HBM," he said.

Looking at domestic production trends by region, the concentration of manufacturing in the greater Seoul area has intensified as semiconductor output has grown, driven by the clustering of chip facilities there. The greater Seoul area's share of domestic semiconductor production expanded 7.8 percentage points, from 74.5 percent in 2014 to 82.3 percent in 2024. The Chungcheong region came next with a 14.7 percent share, while the Daegu–North Gyeongsang Province area (1.8 percent) and the Honam region (1 percent) were limited to the low single digits.

The greater Seoul area's share of total manufacturing production also expanded, rising from 29.4 percent in 2014 to 33.2 percent in 2024.

Within the greater Seoul area, semiconductors' share of manufacturing output more than tripled, from 12.6 percent in 2014 to 29.1 percent in 2024. "Given the significant increase in sales at Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, both of which have production facilities in the greater Seoul area, the semiconductor share within the region is likely even larger by current measures," Jeong said.

The Bank of Korea also noted that competition is intensifying in electric vehicles, batteries and steel as Chinese manufacturers expand their influence in global markets.

China has grown into the world's largest electric vehicle producer on the back of rising global demand for eco-friendly vehicles, and its share of Korea's auto import market has surged accordingly.

The share of American-made vehicles in Korea's auto imports fell sharply, from 28.9 percent in 2022 to 11.1 percent in 2025, while Chinese-made vehicles surged more than tenfold — from 3.5 percent in 2022 to 37.2 percent in 2025 — to claim the top spot among import sources, edging out Germany (37 percent) by 0.2 percentage points.