South Korea’s SK Hynix Plans Semiconductor Plant in Miyagi — 5ch: ‘Because Minimum Wage Is Cheaper Than Korea’s’

Background and Key Points

Background: SK Hynix is the world’s second-largest memory-chip maker, behind Samsung, and a key supplier of the high-bandwidth memory used in Nvidia’s AI accelerators. Japan has spent the past few years trying to rebuild a semiconductor base it once dominated, using subsidy programs run by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) that can cover up to half the cost of a new fab — the same mechanism that lured TSMC to Kumamoto, Micron to Hiroshima, and is funding the domestic Rapidus project in Hokkaido. Japan’s own memory maker, Kioxia (formerly Toshiba’s chip division), has financial ties to SK Hynix through the Bain Capital-led consortium that helped rescue it, though the two remain separate, competing companies rather than partners. Japan’s memory-chip dominance collapsed after the 1986 US-Japan Semiconductor Agreement forced market access for American chips, and Japan never made the leap into logic/CPU manufacturing the way Taiwan and the US did.

The thread’s actual disagreement was less “should Japan attract this plant” and more whether the story is even real: several posters flagged that SK Hynix officially denied any decision had been made, reading the Korean press leak as a negotiating tactic to extract better subsidy terms from Seoul or Tokyo. Separately, posters split between blaming risk-averse Japanese management for sitting out a rare profitable opening, versus blaming an actual shortage of workers regardless of management’s will.

What’s easy to miss: Japan’s minimum wage is set regionally, not nationally, so Miyagi’s ¥1,098 figure is one of the lowest in the country — Tokyo’s is far higher — making the “cheaper than Korea” comparison true only for that specific prefecture, not Japan as a whole.