South Koreas $518 billion AI chip push shows crypto is still losing the capital race

South Korea's two largest chipmakers are committing about $518 billion to new factories to meet demand for artificial-intelligence chips in a further sign of just how much capital AI is drawing in from everywhere else, crypto included.

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix plan to invest roughly 800 trillion won, about $518 billion, to build four new chip fabrication plants in South Korea's southwest, the firms said Monday, as part of a national plan to double the country's output of DRAM, or the standard memory used in phones and computers, over five years.

A South Korean presidential adviser said AI demand could force the companies to finish the work by 2034 or 2035, more than a decade ahead of an earlier 2044 target. SK Hynix separately announced plans last week for a roughly $29 billion U.S. stock listing, among the largest ever, to fund further expansion.

The driver is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, the specialized chips that feed AI training and the large language models behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude.

SK Hynix has become the dominant supplier of those chips, a position that made it South Korea's most valuable listed company this month, passing Samsung for the first time in 25 years. The two firms together supply most of the world's HBM and have struck supply deals with Nvidia and OpenAI.

Such spending is a headwind for crypto because it is the same capital cycle that has competed with digital assets for investor money all year. Crypto fell through much of the month, even on days when AI chip stocks rebounded – the divergence suggestive of how investors view the two classes.

Gabe Selby of CF Benchmarks said much of the new money and attention has flowed into AI plays, leaving crypto fighting for a smaller share of overall risk appetite.

The rotation has shown up in places that used to feed crypto directly.

When gold, silver and bitcoin sold off together in recent weeks as a hedge trade unwound, the cash leaving those hard assets moved into AI stocks rather than into bitcoin.

Even bitcoin miners have been redirecting computing capacity toward AI hosting, where contracted payments beat the swings of mining revenue.

South Korea's $518 billion commitment is a decade-long bet that AI infrastructure spending is structural rather than a passing boom. Crypto has spent the year on the other side of that flow, and the open question is now whether the money chasing chips and AI listings eventually circles back or stays put.