Rep. Lee Hae-min on the Three-Pillar AI Megaproject and Power-Policy Fights
Rep. Lee Hae-min welcomed the government's decision to expand its megaproject beyond memory chips to also cover AI data centers and physical AI. She explained that when Nvidia's Jensen Huang visited Korea, he met not just memory makers but cloud, robotics, and gaming companies too — a sign of a strategy to keep generating new demand (cloud subscriptions, data centers, physical AI) ahead of any plateau in chip demand.
With Asia still lacking an AI data-center hub and roughly 1,000 trillion won in pending demand, she said stable power supply and rate terms are the key to Korea winning that business. She noted that special utility-rate and power purchase agreement (PPA) provisions were stripped from her own AI data-center special bill before it passed the assembly — yet the government later separately announced plans to introduce a dedicated utility rate, a contradiction she has formally demanded the ministry explain in writing.
She described PPAs as direct deals between power generators and consumers that bypass the transmission grid — necessary because waiting for new transmission lines to be built risks losing time-sensitive demand. On criticism that competition among localities for the project has become politicized, she countered that government's job is to build the national infrastructure that lets companies choose freely, with the final siting decision resting with the companies themselves.
Citing Taiwan's full-throttle government support for TSMC's new fab, she argued Korea needs a similar approach — while stressing the goal is to build an environment any company could enter, not favors for one firm. Noting that a large share of papers and booths at the ICML conference currently underway in Korea are Chinese, she warned that China's rapidly strengthening AI fundamentals are both a threat to Korea's megaproject and, potentially, a new source of chip demand.