factory workers now earn $400,000 bonuses
In a small real estate office in Dongtan, South Korea, agent Mark Yoon spends his days tracing laser lines across two wall-size maps, answering questions about apartment prices, school districts and commute times. But after eight years running the shop, he has noticed something curious: almost every conversation, no matter how it starts, eventually turns to semiconductors. That small detail says a lot about the AI impact South Korea is now living through, from who gets rich to how neighborhoods get built. Key takeaways South Korea’s chip industry produces roughly 80% of the world’s high-bandwidth memory chips used to power…
