South Korea Memory Market Dominance Projected to Persist Until 2031

Heavy capital injection by Samsung and SK Hynix secures South Korea's global memory lead through 2031, despite shifting HBM demand from NVIDIA GPUs to custom AI accelerators.

Woofun AI reports that South Korea is projected to sustain its leadership in the global memory chip sector through 2031, driven by substantial capital deployment from Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. Industry analyst Josephine Lo of Yole Group highlighted at the 2026 Future Memory and Storage Conference in California on August 4th that the nation intends to double wafer capacity over the next five years.

The forecast indicates that simultaneous expansion in next-generation DRAM, including High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), and NAND technology will preserve this competitive edge.

Concurrently, HBM demand is anticipated to transition rapidly from NVIDIA graphics processing units to in-house AI accelerators developed by major technology firms such as Google.