Bust Looms Over $60 Billion Splurge by Korean Chip Giants

  • South Korean producers investing in plants, memory capacity
  • Companies counting on new demand from AI, Internet of Things
Memory chips are displayed in this arranged photograph in Tokyo, Japan.

Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

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Record spending by South Korea’s semiconductor giants is raising the specter of another downturn in the chip industry’s boom-bust cycle.

Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc., the biggest makers of the memory chips used in mobile devices, have announced about $60 billion of investments in facilities that each year could pump out millions of silicon wafers -- the building blocks of semiconductors.