South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

They had a large memory manufacturer, Infineon, who spun out their memory division as Qimonda which then went bankrupt [1]. They were the 2nd largest in the world at one time apparently. Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.

Japan has an even sadder story. They were the DRAM top dog for a very long time. South Korea entirely ate their lunch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qimonda

> I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train?

My best guess is that the connecting train was operated by the Deutsche Bahn

Chip fab locations have traditionally had more political than economic importance. Matrix multiplication chips and RAM have been the recent exception, while TSMC has long been the geopolitical exception. ASML's location only matters to the extent that it gets ordered not to sell to someone.

The AMD spinoff GlobalFoundries has a fab in Dresden.

Memory has only really recently become lucrative. Germany still has heavy machinery, trains, drilling machines etc all of which will be needed for a long time regardless of whether the "bubble pops" or not.

IIRC Taiwan took a page out of Singapore's playbook and went all in on electrical engineering and adjecent fields. It was very much a long-term strategy. Germany probably didn't feel nearly as much pressure, and was already very strong in all industry.

Looks like a lazy translation; the president used a word "대도약" while the Chinese campaign that you're referring is translated into "대약진운동".

It's from the president's speech. Too lazy to look up the actual text but I guess he meant "pillars", a common metaphor in East Asia. In English axis and pillar are distinct but in East Asia the line is blurry.

For example, the Japanese word 軸 (jiku) is used to mean the "axis" of a graph, but it is also used in business to mean the "core pillar/backbone" of a strategy (e.g., 経営の軸 keiei no jiku, literally "the axis of management," but conceptually "the pillar of management").

The speech was delivered in Korean so this is a choice by a translator. I don’t speak Korean but I asked an LLM and it says …

the phrase used is "대도약" (daedoyak), which literally means "great leap forward" or "great jump forward." This is NOT "대약진" (daeyakjin), which would be the direct translation of China's "Great Leap Forward" (大跃进).

> 1.5tr parameter models

Curious, what's this based off of?