Chey vows to fast-track Honam semiconductor cluster - 동아일보

The Honam cluster push is fundamentally Seoul's structural hedge against the single-pole concentration of Samsung and SK Hynix fabs in the Gyeonggi corridor. The 2022 export-control escalation already exposed the fragility of geographic clustering. Shifting advanced packaging, HBM back-end processes, and materials R&D toward the Gwangju-Jeonnam axis is short-term risk diversification and, more critically, a mid-term bid for dominance in post-moore packaging — the bottleneck in HBM stacking and fan-out is die-bonding and test, not front-end lithography. For equipment makers, ASML, Tokyo Electron, and Lam Research will see order cycles pulled forward by domestic cluster procurement. Materials suppliers face localization pressure on photoresists and CMP slurries. TSMC and ASE in Taiwan, China are unlikely to mirror this play head-on but will accelerate patent positioning in advanced packaging; Intel may replicate the regional-cluster logic in Arizona under its foundry 2.0 narrative. Over the next 12–24 months, on-schedule Honam commissioning would pull Korea's HBM4 mass-production window into H2 2026, directly compressing Micron's share in AI accelerators. The real variable is not wafer output but whether South Korea can achieve import substitution in ABF substrates and temporary-bonding adhesives — that is where the cluster policy's actual bet lies.