Fujifilm expands South Korean capacity to meet AI chip demand

Fujifilm's capacity build-out in Pyeongtaek and Cheonan is not a production story—it is a geopolitical hedge. The 2019 Japan-Korea trade friction left a permanent scar on Samsung's supply chain doctrine. Relocating EUV photoresist and CMP slurry production within 50 km of the customer's fab is a deliberate strategy to collapse political risk into physical proximity. Technically, 3nm GAA and HBM stacking have pushed CMP cycles from roughly 20 to over 40 per wafer, nearly doubling slurry consumption. Fujifilm's deep coupling with Samsung is a short-term lock-in but a long-term vulnerability: Samsung will inevitably accelerate cultivation of domestic slurry backups to dilute single-source dependency. Competitively, JSR and TOK cannot absorb share erosion. Within 12 months, expect JSR to spin up an EUV photoresist pilot line in Taiwan, China or Arizona, positioning as a "non-Japan-domestic" supplier to sidestep potential export controls. Shin-Etsu, meanwhile, will likely tilt toward TSMC, crystallizing a regional pairing: Fujifilm-Samsung, Shin-Etsu-TSMC. Within 24 months, semiconductor materials will abandon the "global unified supply" paradigm and enter a regional closed-loop era. AI compute demand is the catalyst, but the underlying force is simpler: no fab will stake its yield on a cross-border chain that a single political decision can sever.