00:06A regulator's report and two boardroom decisions this week point in the same direction.
00:11Korea's export playbook is running out of road.
00:15LS Cable is building new plants in Europe and restructuring its entire North American
00:20command structure.
00:22Samsung's next mobile chip just beat Qualcomm's in internal testing, and that could reshape
00:27two business units at once.
00:30And NVIDIA just told Microsoft, Google, and Amazon that AI server racks are getting 17%
00:36more expensive.
00:38It's Monday, August 24th.
00:40Let's look at a business story shaping corporate Korea.
00:44Big tech capital spending on AI is projected to jump from $394.5 billion last year to $781.9
00:54billion this year, and toward $975.4 billion next year.
01:00That spending wave is reshaping supply chains for Korean component makers, and squeezing
01:06memory chip supply at the same time.
01:09Against this backdrop, Washington's CSIS think tank argues Korea's export-led growth
01:15model itself is now under structural pressure.
01:18Here's what the numbers show.
01:20LS Cable's North American backlog reached a record $9.55 trillion won, or about $6.9 billion,
01:29as of June, driven partly by a $5 trillion won, or $3.6 billion, long-term bus bar supply
01:37contract already secured by its US unit, LSCUS.
01:43NVIDIA's Grace Blackwell 300 and Vera Rubin 200 server racks are rising as much as 17% in
01:50price due to memory chip shortages, a move that could add at least $5 billion to the cost
01:56of building a single 1-gigawatt data center.
01:59Samsung's Exynos 2700, built on its 2nm SF2P process, outperformed Qualcomm's next Snapdragon
02:10chip on CPU, GPU, AI, and power efficiency in internal tests.
02:17Samsung spent $7.44 trillion won, or roughly $5.4 billion, on external application processors
02:26in the first half of this year alone.
02:29A cost wider Exynos adoption could reduce.
02:34CSIS argues Korea should shift from selling high-value exports to supplying the memory, energy,
02:40and data center capacity that anchors the broader AI supply chain, as market access increasingly
02:47depends on security alignment and supply resilience rather than price alone.
02:52So what does this mean for corporate Korea?
02:55Earlier we said Korea's export playbook is running out of road.
03:00Here's what that actually means for you.
03:03Boards overseeing supply chains tied to big tech capex now need contingency plans for further
03:09AI-driven cost inflation, not just demand growth.
03:14Samsung's Exynos comeback shows how design wins can lower input costs and raise foundry
03:20utilization at the same time, a model other component makers may need to replicate.
03:26And CSIS's diagnosis is a call to board-level strategy.
03:31The next competitive edge may come from embedding Korean capacity inside allied supply chains, not
03:38just winning on unit economics.
03:41That's today's AI Prism CEO.
03:45This episode was produced with AI Assistants based on Seoul Economic Daily reporting and
03:51reviewed by a human editor.
03:53AI Prism is a WANIFRA award-winning series.
03:57We'll be back tomorrow.
03:58You've been listening to AI Prism from Seoul Economic Daily.
04:01Here's also a WANIFRA
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