South Korea export outlook lifted by AI chip boom, Reuters poll finds

This poll is one more datapoint showing that the AI wave is now a macroeconomic driver, not just a tech story. South Korea’s export rebound is heavily concentrated in semiconductors, with AI‑related demand and stabilising memory prices offsetting weakness in autos, machinery and steel. Citi’s forecast of a 56% jump in chip exports in 2026 underscores how central AI infrastructure has become to trade balances and growth.

For the AGI race, it means that the supply chain dependencies around GPUs and high‑bandwidth memory are hardening into structural advantages for the countries that dominate them. Korea’s fabs and packaging plants are effectively leveraged bets on AI continuing to devour compute at exponential rates. That gives Seoul both incentives and political capital to shape global norms around export controls, supply security and where leading‑edge chips get deployed.

The risk is that such concentration makes the global AI stack more brittle. If a handful of countries and firms control the tap on high‑end memory and logic, disruptions—geopolitical or otherwise—could abruptly slow progress. But in the near term, the data here points to AI‑driven demand as a strong tailwind that will keep funding and political will flowing into the core hardware that underpins advanced models.