High-Purity CO2 Shortage Hits South Korea Chipmakers as Prices Climb 20%

South Korea is facing a tightening supply of high-purity carbon dioxide, a material that advanced semiconductor fabs rely on to clean wafers. Industry sources raised the alarm on June 26, warning that inventories of the gas had slipped below the sector's usual one-month safety buffer. As of late June 2026 the situation remains active, with both memory leaders racing to lock in additional volumes.

The shortage does not begin inside the chip plants. High-purity CO2 is recovered as a byproduct of oil refining, petrochemical production and hydrogen manufacturing. When those upstream facilities cut their operating rates, the volume of raw CO2 available for purification drops quickly. South Korean refiners and petrochemical producers have throttled back output amid uncertainty over crude oil supply tied to Middle East tensions and the disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, and that pullback has flowed straight through to the gas market.

Pricing reflects the squeeze. Liquid carbon dioxide now trades roughly 20 percent higher than at the start of the year, and industry participants expect the tight conditions to persist through the end of 2026. Even buyers willing to pay the premium are struggling to secure fresh volumes, because purification and supply capacity cannot scale up on short notice.

The two companies most exposed are Samsung Electronics and SK hynix. Samsung consumes an estimated 1,800 to 2,000 tons of high-purity CO2 each month, while SK hynix uses around 600 to 700 tons. Neither has reported a production halt, but their buffer stocks keep shrinking, prompting aggressive procurement and stockpiling. The pressure lands at a sensitive moment, as demand for AI memory has pushed both firms to run advanced lines hard.

Why the gas matters so much comes down to purity and process. Electronic-grade CO2 for leading-edge chips reaches 5N and 6N levels, with impurities held to the parts-per-billion range. In supercritical cleaning the gas behaves like both a liquid and a gas, letting it slip into the narrow, high-aspect-ratio structures of advanced devices and strip away residues without damaging fine patterns. Standard industrial CO2 cannot substitute, since any contamination risks defects that are costly at advanced nodes.

The episode echoes earlier scares. The same fabs have already weathered supply interruptions in helium, anhydrous hydrogen fluoride and a key photoresist solvent, most of them traced back to geopolitical strain in the Middle East. Each case exposes how heavily the chip supply chain leans on byproducts from refining and petrochemicals, leaving it vulnerable when those industries slow.

Domestic suppliers including Taekyung Chemical, regarded as the market leader, alongside Seondo Chemical, Dongkwang Chemical and SK Airplus, are central to keeping Korean fabs running. Longer term, the disruption is accelerating efforts to build out local purification capacity, expand recycling and diversify sourcing so that a single upstream slowdown no longer threatens the cleanroom.