YONGIN — "By November next year, the mountain will be gone. This rice will, in effect, become semiconductor wafers."
On the 30th of last month, logging crews were clearing trees on a hillside slated for blasting at the site of the national semiconductor industrial complex in Yongin's Cheoin district, Gyeonggi Province, while rice in nearby paddies was ripening to a golden hue. On the roughly 7.78 million-square-meter site, where Samsung Electronics (005930) plans to build six chip plants, a race against the clock has begun with the work of cutting down the mountain and hauling away the earth.
The Korea Land & Housing Corporation (LH) is pushing to move up completion of the initial site preparation to November next year from the end of 2028 as originally planned, in line with a request from Samsung Electronics. LH will sign a construction contract with a consortium led by Daewoo Engineering & Construction (047040) in the middle of this month and begin work on the priority zone this month, two months earlier than initially scheduled. The first section covers 3.45 million square meters, with estimated construction costs of 1.086 trillion won (about $780 million).
The key challenge on the ground lies in leveling the mountain to prepare the site. According to LH, roughly 50 million tons of soil and rock must be handled, six times the volume used to fill in Yeouido. Moving soil from the first section to the neighboring second section alone will require 2 million dump truck trips, LH said. Even if the mountain is cut quickly, follow-up work stalls if the soil cannot be removed on schedule.
The Daewoo Engineering & Construction consortium has proposed cutting the mountain in terraced steps from the summit down while blasting at 13 locations simultaneously. It plans to use larger rock-drilling equipment and raise the height of each blasting bench to increase the volume handled in a single round. The consortium also plans to add soil-hauling routes, which had been concentrated in one place, to ease bottlenecks where vehicles pile up.
Procedures will also overlap. Cultural heritage surveys will begin on sections where logging has been completed, while compensation, permits and construction tendering proceed in parallel. Compensation procedures have been completed for 99% of the total area of private land — 43% through negotiated purchase and 56% through filings for expropriation rulings. To ensure safety alongside speed, the project will deploy collision-prevention systems for equipment and workers, as well as four-legged walking robots and drones.
"To build the national semiconductor industrial complex early, which is a national task, we are breaking away from existing work practices and aggressively pursuing norm-breaking innovation, such as boldly running sequential procedures in parallel, adding momentum to the project," LH President Lee Sung-hoon said. "We will provide unwavering support for the successful completion of the government's three mega-projects."
