Two wall-size maps in Dongtan, South Korea, render all the city’s streets and apartment blocks in meticulous detail. Between them stands real estate agent Mark Yoon, laser pointer in hand. Clients drift in and out of his shop-front office asking about apartment prices, commuting times and school districts in the city, about 30 miles south of the country’s capital of Seoul. Yoon answers by tracing laser lines across the maps. Eight years of selling homes here have taught him that almost every conversation eventually arrives at the same destination: semiconductors.
The reason is visible on Yoon’s maps and just beyond his office windows. Nearby shuttle buses ferry engineers to Samsung Electronics Co.’s vast semiconductor campuses in Hwaseong and Giheung, and highways put rival SK Hynix Inc.’s operation within reach. That makes Dongtan a residential crossroads for South Korea’s chip industry, which pumps out about 80% of the world’s high-bandwidth memory chips that are powering the artificial intelligence revolution.