{"id":239972,"date":"2026-06-30T07:05:58","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T12:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/two-south-korean-companies-named-samsung-electronics-and-sk-hynix-now-manufacture-roughly-two-thirds-of-the-memory-chips-inside-almost-every-digital-device-on-earth-produced-inside-a-country"},"modified":"2026-06-30T07:05:58","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T12:05:58","slug":"two-south-korean-companies-named-samsung-electronics-and-sk-hynix-now-manufacture-roughly-two-thirds-of-the-memory-chips-inside-almost-every-digital-device-on-earth-produced-inside-a-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/two-south-korean-companies-named-samsung-electronics-and-sk-hynix-now-manufacture-roughly-two-thirds-of-the-memory-chips-inside-almost-every-digital-device-on-earth-produced-inside-a-country","title":{"rendered":"Two South Korean companies named Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix now manufacture roughly two-thirds of the memory chips inside almost every digital device on Earth \u2014 produced inside a country whose 1953 per-capita income was lower than Somalia\u2019s or Haiti\u2019s"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/two-south-korean-companies-named-samsung-electronics-and-sk-hynix-now-manufacture-roughly-two-thirds-of-the-memory-chips-inside-almost-every-digital-device-on-earth-produced-inside-a-country.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Open any device built in the past five years, look inside its memory subsystem, and the chips you find were almost certainly fabricated in one of three South Korean industrial cities \u2014 Hwaseong, Pyeongtaek, or Icheon \u2014 by one of two companies whose combined market capitalisation now exceeds $700 billion. The historical improbability of this situation is not a matter of degree but of category. Korea in 1953 did not have a semiconductor industry, a precision manufacturing tradition, an advanced engineering workforce, or the kind of capital markets that could finance industrial development. It had a per-capita income lower than essentially every other country whose subsequent economic trajectory has been studied by development economists, a primarily agricultural economy substantially destroyed by three years of active warfare, and a small population (~20 million) whose adult literacy rate stood at approximately 20 percent. The proposition that, 72 years later, two companies headquartered in the same country would manufacture the memory chips inside Apple\u2019s iPhones, Google\u2019s Pixel devices, Microsoft\u2019s data centres, Nvidia\u2019s AI accelerators, Tesla\u2019s autonomous-driving computers, and essentially every other major piece of digital hardware sold globally \u2014 would have been considered, by any reasonable observer in 1953, structurally impossible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Open any device built in the past five years, look inside its memory subsystem, and the chips you find were almost certainly fabricated in one of three South Korean industrial cities \u2014 Hwaseong, Pyeongtaek, or Icheon \u2014 by one of two companies whose combined market capitalisation now exceeds $700 billion. The historical improbability of this [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,45,1506,9,1512,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-finance","category-food","category-military","category-mobile-phones","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}