South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots (opens in new tab)

The 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.

I 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!

> “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.

Why humanoid? Surely there must be a superior physical form factor than one mimicking human anatomy. Is it just supposed to be more psychologically acceptable?

Why is the whole world jumping on to humanoid robots? What am I not seeing that requires this level of investment in it?

South 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

What'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.

It'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.

Better 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