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South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots
- aaron695 4mo ago[dead]
- paulmist 4mo ago> “Semiconductors, physical AI, and AI data centers are the triple axis for a great leap forward.” Not the best wording... I wonder how serious this announcement is.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- winstonlee 4mo agoIt's from the president's speech. Too lazy to look up the actual text but I guess he meant "pillars", a common metaphor in East Asia. In English axis and pillar are distinct but in East Asia the line is blurry. For example, the Japanese word 軸 (jiku) is used to mean the "axis" of a graph, but it is also used in business to mean the "core pillar/backbone" of a strategy (e.g., 経営の軸 keiei no jiku, literally "the axis of management," but conceptually "the pillar of management").
- jazzyjackson 4mo agoThe speech was delivered in Korean so this is a choice by a translator. I don’t speak Korean but I asked an LLM and it says … the phrase used is "대도약" (daedoyak), which literally means "great leap forward" or "great jump forward." This is NOT "대약진" (daeyakjin), which would be the direct translation of China's "Great Leap Forward" (大跃进).
- yongjik 4mo agoTo expand a bit, even saying 대약진 _daeyakjin_ "great leap forward" wouldn't have turned many eyes, because _dae_ is just a common prefix ("great") and _yakjin_ is also a common word meaning "leap forward, push forward, improve". The word simply doesn't have the same connotation of the English phrase "Great Leap Forward", which is almost always used for the infamous Chinese movement. If a Korean speaker wanted to talk about that Chinese movement, they'd use the full name, 대약진운동 (大跃进运动): the great leap forward movement.
- summerlight 4mo agoLooks like a lazy translation; the president used a word "대도약" while the Chinese campaign that you're referring is translated into "대약진운동".
- Mistletoe 4mo agoTop signal.
- HSO 4mo agotypical western main character syndrome
- whatever1 4mo agoI wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train? They had literally everything: universities, manufacturing culture, expertise and supporting supply chains, cash. I forgot, they also had ASML, freaking next door!
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- zuzululu 4mo ago[flagged]
- cherryteastain 4mo agoThey had a large memory manufacturer, Infineon, who spun out their memory division as Qimonda which then went bankrupt [1]. They were the 2nd largest in the world at one time apparently. Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis. Japan has an even sadder story. They were the DRAM top dog for a very long time. South Korea entirely ate their lunch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qimonda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qimonda
- paulmist 4mo agoEven better, Qimonda was ultimately bought (alongside all their patents) by SMIC [1] who is now the Chinese memory player. For 30 million. [1] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/chinas-cxmt-is-set-to-challenge-dram https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/chinas-cxmt-is-set-to-...
- yieldcrv 4mo agoBetter spend it now, people won’t need greater than 1.5tr parameter models and battery powered consumer devices will be able to run those and lower sufficiently capable models by then, distributing the need for compute away from capital projects the glut will be enormous yes, immortalize this phrase just like the 640kb ram phrase, I’ll stand by it
- dolebirchwood 4mo agoWhy humanoid? Surely there must be a superior physical form factor than one mimicking human anatomy. Is it just supposed to be more psychologically acceptable?
- Retric 4mo agoHuman spaces are built for humans. Outdoors cars and quad coppers are a great form but constrained by stars, doors, and low ceiling makes them a poor fit. Alternatively a 2 foot tall or a 20 foot tall humanoid robots aren’t particularly useful. But a good enough 5-6 foot tall humanoid robot can be swapped into an assembly line wherever a human is currently working without redesigning that workspace.
- redorb 4mo agoThere are just a few reasons - humanoid make sense, mostly for multi purpose tasks - where if you want a robot to be multi-job, do almost everything a human can do at work -- If you want a weld you need a 1 arm robot, if a robot to weld, then stack, then push parts on a cart across the factory - then sweep up, then etc.. etc.. perhaps a humanoid is alright. There will definitely be too many people comfortable with ownership / master relationship with a humanoid robot that will do their bidding.
- jayd16 4mo agoI understand the argument but its honestly ridiculous in my eyes. How about a set of arms that can reach into dishwasher and stack dishes and a washer/dryer to fold laundry... Except even without solving the bipedal movement, that doesn't exist at a consumer price point. Why are we pretending the hardest version of this is close to existing?
- Schiendelman 4mo agoIt doesn't need to be at a consumer price point first, it needs to replace a human at an existing warehouse or manufacturing role first, and that's achievable in the next two years at this point. When you have arms that can reach into the dishwasher, you're also going to want them to put away your dishes. And so suddenly they need to get up high. And you're not going to have a SECOND set of arms at your washer/dryer to fold laundry, you're just going to buy a second DLC for your existing robot. And it needs to get between those places, so if you have stairs, wheels don't cut it. You need a bipedal robot very quickly.
- GuB-42 4mo agoThe title sounds to me like: I am going to spend $1000 in groceries and dance lessons. That is, two very different things lumped together. Memory chips are like groceries, essential commodity parts, a no-nonsense investment. Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain.
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- Schiendelman 4mo agoHumanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.
- HerbManic 4mo agoThis is the path that Japan tried to go down and it hasn't worked out yet, but we have also solved a lot more of the technical issues since they began. going to be interesting to see if we pull it off this time.
- Schiendelman 4mo agoI think they mostly tried to go down this path before we had the transformer. With VLA models, or really now "Large Behavior Models", what's possible has changed dramatically. I've seen robot arms fold laundry now. Textile work is insanely hard, now it's just putting a lot of learned behavior together.
- missedthecue 4mo agoHumanoid robots barely progressed between 2000-2020. There have obviously been incremental improvements in things like dexterity, vision, self-balancing, and locomotion, but in terms of having a useful humanoid robot, Honda's ASIMO released in the year 2000 is not crazily behind what we had in 2020. So it's not surprise we haven't seen economic dividends yet in the real world. I think AI is what could make humanoids turn from parlor tricks to huge amounts of utility, but we're really going to have to see how it plays out in the next 5-10 years.
- yalogin 4mo agoWhy is the whole world jumping on to humanoid robots? What am I not seeing that requires this level of investment in it?
- stogot 4mo agoThey can sell “employees” who don’t require salaries, onboarding, healthcare, 401k, benefits, etc and then leave after two years of being lazy and try to sue you. (This is how it will be marketed)
- anigbrowl 4mo agoEconomies like South Korea and Japan have a drastic population deficit that means there are simply not enough people around to perform many kinds of manual labor tasks.
- SecretDreams 4mo agoSex bots and disposable police. This is basically the future in every dystopian SciFi these politicians and oligarchs grew up watching. This is just living out fantasy.
- tonyhart7 4mo agowhy you acting like this isn't awesome ??? Cyberpunk is great game and I would like to have cyborg arm
- kart23 4mo agoautomating repetitive physical work doesn’t appeal to you?
- scheme271 4mo agoSure, but I'm not sure humanoid robots is the best form factor for this. E.g. something with a wheeled base makes movement calculations a lot easier since you don't need to deal with balance while moving.
- aussieguy1234 4mo agoSouth Korea is facing a serious demographic crisis, in the not too distant future it'll be a country of mostly elderly folk. I'd be interested to know if this investment has anything to do with this, since robots may be needed in the absence of young able bodied folk. More info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
- SecretDreams 4mo agoIt's crazy how much 1at could improve QOL for their citizens and also improve and diversify their economy. Alas, they're just going to subsidize ram prices for everyone when this current cycles goes from boom to bust.
- danipark 4mo agoSince this money belongs to Samsung and Hynix, it cannot be used for charitable activities. However, it is much better to build new cities, semiconductor factories, and power plants than to pay dividends to shareholders. The construction industry is one of the easiest ways to stimulate the economy.
- ETH_start 4mo agoWhat's incredible is how much resistance there is in the U.S. to do what for other countries is the obvious strategy forward. The U.S. — after decades of seeing manufacturing being outsourced — suddenly has an incredible advantage in data centers that is producing onshore facilities that are adding hundreds of billions of dollars in annual export revenue, and instead of there being a united front to maximize that advantage, there are huge obstacles being thrown in the way of the companies, administration and the state governments leading the data center expansion campaign, with Sanders and AOC calling for a national data center moratorium.
- le-mark 4mo agoI live two miles (as the crow flies) from the site of a new construction of a data center. It’s being built by a European company. They will be installing gas turbines for power generation. Are we far enough away so that low frequency sound won’t affect our quality of life? We are seriously considering selling our home and moving. It’s a huge gamble for us. We are also noticing homes are staying on the market much longer than previously. These data centers also get huge tax incentives because “jerbs”. Local politicians don’t understand after construction they don’t bring jobs or revenue to the city or county. This is where the resistance comes from.
- ETH_start 4mo agoThat's a reasonable concern. Any industrial site is going to be a concern for nearby residences. But even proposed sites far away from any residential settlements are being opposed. The proposed National Data Center moratorium, for instance, is completely sweeping and would be devastating for U.S. strategic interests. As for tax revenue, data centers contribute significantly to local communities. https://www.wyedc.org/media/p/item/61886/data-centers-provide-communities-with-increased-tax-revenue https://www.wyedc.org/media/p/item/61886/data-centers-provid... "Loudoun County, Virginia, often dubbed the "Data Center Capital of the World," provides a compelling example of how data centers can reshape a community's fiscal landscape. In 2018, the county hosted about 13 million square feet of permitted data centers. By 2024, that figure skyrocketed to 43 million square feet—a 231% increase in just six years. This remarkable growth has substantially boosted Loudoun's tax base. The county's data center industry now contributes an estimated $890 million annually in tax revenue, nearly matching its entire operating budget of $940 million. What makes data centers particularly advantageous is their cost-to-revenue ratio. For every dollar of tax revenue received from data centers, the county spends just $0.04 to support them, compared to $0.25 for traditional businesses. This financial efficiency has allowed Loudoun County to maintain the lowest real property tax rate in Northern Virginia—approximately 25% lower than neighboring counties."
- bwfan123 4mo ago> $585B on new fabs, This is how overcapacity happens in a commodity. The is a rush to expand capacity to meet demand, and there will be overshoot. I hope these factories are built quickly so the memory crunch eases.
- tonyhart7 4mo agoit wouldn't be overcapacity in any shape or form people literally cant give up AI right now and paid thousands of dollar for local AI model 5 years ago people would told you crazy spends 5k on such machine, now ????? people literally encourage you
- russli1993 4mo agoif you look at the price per gb of memory, at today's prices its only equal to 2014. People don't complain about memory prices back then. The reality is modern world just need much more memory. Before 8GB memory was enough, today my 32GB memory is 95% used all the time due to chrome. And my 2TB SSD is filled with 4K HDR videos. This is not counting massive storage needs by datasets, AI models, KV caches, and bandwidth needed for LLM inferencing.
- oliwarner 4mo agoWhat's the run-up time on a RAM fab? 5-10 years?
- ksec 4mo agoDepends. Still bottlenecked by ASML I would assume. Otherwise the current record holder TSMC manage to bring up a Fab operation and HVM in less than 18 months. Of course that requires a lot of planning before hand.
- razorbeamz 4mo agoWhat is the big push for humanoid robots? We make non-humanoid robots because they're better at doing things than humanoid robots are.
- kakacik 4mo agomusk does it, so it must be good (TM), or something about cargo culting
- imtringued 4mo agoI generally don't like the phrase cargo culting, but building a humanoid robot is probably the ultimate form of cargo culting. The idea is this: You build a robot in the shape of a human with the hope that by building the robot well enough in the image of humans, it will become sentient and intelligent on its own. That is literally the pitch of every single humanoid robot company on the planet.
- logicchains 4mo ago>We make non-humanoid robots because they're better at doing things than humanoid robots are. They're only better at some things, and some they can't do at all. If there's going to be a mass market for household robots, people are going to want a robot that can clean their toilet, read a book to their kids, unblock their kitchen sink, and climb a ladder onto the roof to get leaves out of their gutter, not a separate robot for each job. Any non-humanoid robot would struggle to do everything around the house that a human can do.
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- ksec 4mo ago>The most costly of the megaprojects involves a commitment by Samsung and SK Hynix of $585 billion to build new chip fabrication plants..... The government’s goal is to double South Korea’s production of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) within five years. "Double" I was wondering about that $585B number only to read they plan to Double the capacity. The two firm together is nearly 70% of the current DRAM market supply. I guess we are really going into an era where future Phone and PC will have 16GB as minimum, possibly more. Even if the market are back to normal, that is doubling the revenue. The current AI scale and Cloud infrastructure buildout is simply beyond what I could comprehend.