The artificial intelligence semiconductor market will grow to roughly KRW 1,200 trillion, according to a new assessment reported by Asia Economic Daily (아시아경제) — and the same analysis delivers a blunt warning to Korea's chip industry: the next three to five years will determine whether Korean companies survive in the sector.

The figure anchors a market projection that reframes AI silicon from a premium niche into the dominant share of the global semiconductor economy. Converted at recent exchange rates, KRW 1,200 trillion sits near USD 850-900 billion, which would place the AI chip segment alone in the same revenue territory that the entire worldwide semiconductor industry occupies today. The report does not specify a target year for the KRW 1,200 trillion milestone, but its framing makes clear that the trajectory unfolds over the near term — within the same three-to-five-year horizon it calls decisive for Korean suppliers.

That compressed timeline is the harder half of the message. The analysis argues that Korean companies cannot treat AI semiconductors as a gradual extension of their existing memory business. The window in which incumbents can secure design wins, manufacturing share and customer lock-in is closing quickly, and companies that fail to establish a defensible position during this period risk being pushed out of the market's growth phase entirely.

The warning lands on an industry where the stakes are unambiguous. Korea's semiconductor exports are dominated by memory — Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together supply the majority of the world's DRAM and a large share of NAND. SK Hynix has already converted a decisive slice of its DRAM output to HBM, the high-bandwidth memory stacked alongside AI accelerators, making it a principal supplier to the AI training buildout. Samsung is racing to expand its own HBM position and to convert more of its advanced logic capacity toward foundry customers building AI processors.

The report's survival framing speaks directly to the gap between those positions and the rest of the AI silicon stack. The highest-value segments — AI accelerators, GPUs and custom training silicon — are dominated by NVIDIA and a small circle of U.S. designers, while TSMC manufactures the overwhelming majority of the world's most advanced AI logic chips. Korean companies remain largely absent from those segments, which is where the bulk of the projected KRW 1,200 trillion in value will concentrate if current patterns hold.

This is why the three-to-five-year window matters commercially rather than rhetorically. AI customers choose memory suppliers, foundry partners and packaging routes years before volume shipments begin. Design decisions being locked in now will determine revenue share through the end of the decade. A Korean supplier that misses those decisions does not get a second bidding round — the platform slots are filled, qualification cycles run for years, and the customer base consolidates around incumbents.

The report also implicitly raises the policy dimension. Korea's government has repeatedly identified AI semiconductors as a strategic priority, and the survival warning functions as an argument for faster action on R&D funding, infrastructure and talent rather than incremental support. For Samsung and SK Hynix, the question is whether they can move from component suppliers in someone else's AI stack to architects of platforms in their own right — within the half-decade the analysis says they have.

If the KRW 1,200 trillion projection holds, the competitive picture of the late 2020s will have been decided by the investments, capacity allocations and design wins that Korean chipmakers commit to over the next three to five years.