Chey Tae-won, chairman of SK Group, was asked whether he would be willing to build a semiconductor plant in Gwangju and South Jeolla, where renewable energy is produced, and answered, "I will think it over." Announcing ways to advance artificial intelligence (AI), Chey said the country needs "local production and local consumption of electricity."
On the morning of the 28th, Chey attended a Korea-China lawmakers' alliance policy seminar at the National Assembly Members' Office Building and delivered a special lecture on the theme "Korea's growth strategy amid the U.S.-China AI technology hegemony race." About 40 lawmakers from both the ruling and opposition parties attended to hear Chey's lecture.
In the lecture, Chey stressed that to strengthen national AI capabilities, it is important to invest in infrastructure such as AI data centers and to increase AI demand in the public sector. He also identified capital, energy, GPUs (graphics processing units), and memory semiconductors as causes of the "bottleneck" and outlined directions for AI development.
After Chey's lecture, a Q&A session for lawmakers focused on energy-related questions. In particular, Chung Jin-uk of the Democratic Party of Korea asked, "There is electricity in Gwangju and South Jeolla—do you plan to build a semiconductor plant there?" Because transmitting electricity produced in the provinces to the Seoul metropolitan area incurs expense, he was asking whether there are plans to build plants in regions where a lot of renewable energy is produced.
Chey said, "We have to go where there is electricity. But I am not sure we can say that a semiconductor plant must go there," adding, "Since there is electricity (in Gwangju and South Jeolla), we are looking for businesses we can do there." He added, "Electricity itself is a bottleneck, so research is ongoing into how to use electricity well. I will speak when we have an answer."
Park Jeong of the Democratic Party asked Chey, "SK Group's sales have been strong recently; would you be willing to prepay electricity bills for one to three years?" Chey said, "This is the first time I've heard of an electricity-bill prepayment system," and added, "Since this is the first proposal I've received, I will consider it and comment."
Even so, he said, "Electricity should be used where it is generated, but since that is not possible now, we have to bring it to the Seoul metropolitan area," adding, "As a solution, distributed generation is a good example. The centrally controlled approach of seizing and distributing electricity from one place should be reconsidered, and this is an issue the public and private sectors must think through together."