The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Korean Exports Skyrocket Thanks to AI || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Korean exports are up roughly 70% year over year, surpassing $100 billion in a single month. So, what's causing this extreme growth?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4oW3cg4

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here. Come to you from Smokey Colorado. We are at the 1st of July, and we just got good data out of the Koreans for their exports. And they set not just a record, but an insane record. Topped $100 billion for a country with under 50 million people in one month. And that is a 70% increase from just a year earlier. You heard that right, 7% increase. And really, almost all of the increase has to do with artificial intelligence. So as everyone who's not brain dead is aware, there is an AI boom going on around the world, most notably in the United States, China, and Southeast Asia. And there are three big components that go into the hardware that makes AI work.

The first, the most famous, the one that gets the most press time, is the graphics processing unit. These are high-end chips that are typically etched with extreme, multivolite technology that comes out of a company called ASML that's based out of the Netherlands. And most of these high-end chips are fabricated in Taiwan. About 80% of global supply, I'd argue, right now. The balance is mostly the United States. This is where the thinking happens. This is the processing that is the core of what makes a large language model and AI models like LLM's work.

So, number one. Number two, you've got something called NAND, N-A-N-D, which is cold memory. And so when you're not using your computer or your data center is not using whatever the memory is, things are stored in NAND. Even if the power is off, NAND will keep its memory. And you have a lot of that sitting on the board in the general vicinity of the GPU just to absorb things that are not an active play. And then third, you've got something called DRAM, DRA. dynamic random access memory and this is the hot memory and so as data is going back and

forth and back and forth and back and forth from the GPUs to other things it's usually the dram that holds it temporarily and it can be in two forms you have your independent dram stacks off to the side and you have something called high bandwidth memory which is basically a stack of dram right next to sometimes even attached to the GPU anyway the Koreans don't do much if at anything at all with the GPUs. And NAND is an old technology where they've discovered because it doesn't generate heat. You can stack the chips on top of one another. And so it's not particularly advanced.

The Koreans do a lot of it. But that's not the groundbreaking stuff. What the Koreans excel at is the dram, the dynamic access memory, the hot memory. And they produce about 90% of the world's high-end dram. So three things from this. Number one, if you want to dominate your own computer supply chain system, GPUs, which is what the Biden administration and the Trump administration are obsessed about, or only one part of the process. Computing is a lot more complicated than rocket surgery,

and there are thousands more pieces that go into it than in any other manufacturing sector. So I would say it's a fool's errand to try to concentrate at your country, but if you're going to, you have to throw a lot wider net than we have been so far. Number two, memory is every bit as important as GPUs, and especially the architecture of the memory and integrating it with the GPUs. And this is something the Chinese can't do and the Taiwanese can't do. And the Koreans can't do.

This is something the U.S. already does. So I'd argue that from a value-added point of view, the United States already dominates the part that's most important. Designing the system so the geometry of the chips actually does what we need it to do. Third, and most important, I think, in the midterm, is that the same technologies that I have identified over and over and over again, the silicon processing, the carper processing,

the EUV system itself, all of the logistics and the supply chains, and the inputs and the testing and the packaging, all of these things that require 50-odd countries in order to get the GPUs, also, for the most part, applies to the dram. So we're existing in this little window where the world is technologically advanced enough and integrated enough that we can get the designs out of the United States and the logistics managed by the United States and the photo masks managed by the Japanese and the copper out of Chile and the rare earths out of China and the silicon out of North Carolina and the GPUs out of Taiwan and the dram out of Korea and it all just works right now but you lose even one of those pieces and this all stops so if you're into AI or you like the Koreans enjoy this moment it's a good moment build everything

You can because very soon that's not going to work. And we're going to have to take a decade or three off from AI and its sister technologies until such time as we can rebuild the bulk of the supply chain in a more geopolitically sustainable manner.