The ultrapure water semiconductor market in Korea runs at national scale. Ultrapure water is the largest consumable stream in a fab by volume. Samsung Electronics and SK hynix run dedicated production and reuse plants at their Korean wafer sites, government planning sizes fab water supply in hundreds of thousands of cubic meters a day, and a state program is localizing the equipment inside those plants. For a foreign supplier the question is which layer stays open.
This page sits under the guide to Korea semiconductor market access and treats the water layer as a market: what fabs specify, how much they consume, who signs, and what localization removes. Technical selection and distribution route to Inquivix Technologies.
What Do Korean Fabs Require From Ultrapure Water?
Ultrapure water is process water stripped of ions, dissolved gases, organic carbon, and particles to the limits of measurement, then held at that quality to the tool. Excursions become defects and yield loss, so the utility group guards the specification tightly.
A Korean fab cites several SEMI standards. SEMI F63, “Guide for Ultrapure Water Used in Semiconductor Processing,” sits at revision F63-1224 and carries the quality criteria. SEMI F61-0521, “Guide to Design and Operation of a Semiconductor Ultrapure Water System,” opens by saying it should be used in conjunction with F63 and with SEMI F75-0521 on quality monitoring, so the three read as one set. SEMI F57-0622, “Specification for High Purity Polymer Materials and Components Used in Ultrapure Water and Liquid Chemical Distribution Systems,” decides whether a foreign component maker’s wetted materials are admissible, on the liquid chemical side as well as the water side. SEMI F121 covers particle precursor metrology, and ASTM D5127 is the parallel electronics guide.
Resistivity tops out near 18.18 megohm-cm at 25 degrees Celsius, the physical ceiling for pure water, commonly written as 18.2 megohm-cm and equivalent to about 0.055 microsiemens per cm. An October 2025 AZoM interview with Mettler Toledo’s Jim Cannon puts total organic carbon at or below 1 part per billion, silica at or below 0.5 parts per billion, and dissolved oxygen at or below 10 parts per billion. Seoul Economic Daily’s May 2026 coverage of the SK siltron Gumi transfer put the Korean production requirement for dissolved gases at or below 1 part per billion. Ion limits are set per species in nanograms per litre, and boron is the hardest of them to remove.
Particles are where the specification has outrun the instruments. The IRDS 2024 Yield Enhancement chapter puts the killer size for the most critical electrically active particles as small as 3.0 nanometres and the critical particle size for semiconductor manufacture below 5 nanometres, and SEMI C79-0819 evaluates filters across the 5 to 15 nanometre range. Routine monitoring still runs on laser particle counters capable of about 20 nanometres with limited counting efficiency, per the same chapter. Closing that gap is one of the things Korea is buying.
How Much Ultrapure Water Do Korean Fabs Use?
The published ultrapure water number is Veolia’s. Its project page for SK hynix lists 108,528 cubic meters a day of ultrapure water capacity across the Icheon and Cheongju sites, alongside 25,000 cubic meters a day of wastewater treatment at Cheongju. (One tonne of water equals one cubic meter, so Korean tons figures convert directly.)
Gross industrial water allocations run larger and measure something else. Korean government planning allows 150,000 to 200,000 tons of industrial water a day per fabrication plant, from the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment supply plan for the new southwestern chip cluster reported by The Korea Times in July 2026. Samsung’s national industrial complex at Yongin is sized at 764,000 tons a day at full operation in the environment ministry’s January 2024 plan, with supply staged to 2034 as set out in the guide to the Yongin semiconductor cluster. Those allocations cover cooling towers, scrubbers, HVAC humidification, wastewater dilution, and site services alongside process water.
Between them sits the per-fab total. Robeco put a single fab’s operating water use at roughly 20 to 38 million litres a day in a March 2026 note by Jindapa Wanner-Thavornsuk, footnoting iScience and Semiconductor Digest, both September 2025. That is 20,000 to 38,000 cubic meters a day for one fab, which means an entire multi-fab ultrapure water capacity sits below a single fab’s gross industrial water allocation.
The growth story is reuse. Samsung Electronics reports reusing about 108 million tonnes of water at its Korean semiconductor sites in 2025, against a 110 million target for 2026, per its Sustainability Report 2026, which defines reuse as water reuse within manufacturing processes plus reuse volume through internal treatment facilities. That report’s ESG data appendix breaks out ultrapure water: Device Solutions supply of 76,684 thousand tonnes in 2025 against recovery of 25,156. Samsung states no rate, but the derived UPW recovery is roughly 33 percent for 2025 and roughly 32 percent for 2024, which is the number an equipment buyer wants.
The 2030 target in the same report is net zero increase in water withdrawal at those sites against 2021 levels, held by introducing recycled municipal wastewater from 2030. The 2024 edition of the report said Device Solutions withdrawal requirements are forecast to continue growing by 2030 relative to 2021 levels, with reuse making up the difference. Growing requirement against a flat intake ceiling is an equipment problem, and the clearest source of new UPW spending in Korea.
Who Buys Ultrapure Water Semiconductor Systems in Korea?
Four buying centers sit between a foreign supplier and a Korean wafer line, and group structure decides which one matters.
Fab utility and facilities engineering owns the specification, the qualification, and the acceptance criteria. At Samsung Electronics that sits in the Device Solutions Division’s Global Manufacturing & Infrastructure organization, which its own DS recruiting material describes as designing, developing, and maintaining the systems that supply electricity, ultrapure water, HVAC, and gas. At SK hynix the equivalent utility technology function is organized around HVAC and exhaust, piping, gas and chemical and water treatment, electrical and control, and architecture, per the company’s posted job categories. These groups stay the technical decision makers even when the purchase order issues elsewhere.
Engineering and construction contractors build the plants, and at both groups the first call is usually an in-group affiliate. Samsung E&A delivered the Pyeongtaek P2 utility plant. Samsung C&T’s engineering and construction group handled foundation work on Pyeongtaek P1 through P4, with Samsung Heavy Industries doing finishing work on P3 and P4, per The Elec. At SK the route runs through SK ecoplant, an SK Group affiliate that entered ultrapure water in 2022 alongside Hansu Technical Service, aiming to reduce Korean reliance on Japanese and other foreign suppliers, per Aju Business Daily in October 2022.
That wall is permeable. Kolon Global, a Kolon Group construction company with no Samsung ownership, disclosed a KRW 104.76 billion Samsung Electronics award for phase 3 of the Pyeongtaek P5 water purification plant, running to 30 June 2028, in an 18 August 2026 change agreement that lifted the value above the reporting threshold. Water plant scope at a Samsung fab does go outside the group, and that is the opening worth chasing.
Operators run the plants once built, and the routing differs by group. SK hynix contracts operation out: Veolia has run ultrapure water and wastewater treatment at Icheon and Cheongju since June 2018, and Hansu Technical Service has supplied ultrapure water EPC, commissioning, operation, and maintenance to semiconductor makers including SK hynix since 1988. On that side the operator’s approved-materials list decides a membrane, resin, or instrument supplier’s recurring revenue. Samsung’s Global Manufacturing & Infrastructure organization claims maintenance of those utility systems itself, so on the Samsung side that list sits with the customer.
Above them sit the incumbent system houses. Kurita, Organo, and Nomura Micro Science have held the core ultrapure water plant business across Asian semiconductor manufacturing for decades, and Nomura made its first overseas delivery to South Korea in 1983, per its own published history. Ecolab announced in August 2025 that it would acquire Ovivo’s electronics ultrapure water business. Global Water Intelligence, cited by Aju Business Daily in May 2026, put the worldwide ultrapure water market across all end industries at 46.5 trillion won in 2025, rising to 58.9 trillion won by 2030. The slice a component supplier can address sits far below that headline.
For most foreign entrants, the realistic sale is a component, an instrument, a membrane, a resin, or a subsystem inside someone else’s plant. The same pattern holds across the broader Korea semiconductor equipment market, where tool categories with entrenched incumbents leave openings in the layers below.
What Does Korea’s Ultrapure Water Localization Program Change?
It closes categories in sequence, and the openings that remain are narrowing. Korea has run a national high-purity industrial water localization program since 2021 through the environment ministry, the Korea Environmental Industry and Technology Institute, and K-water. Phase 1, running 2021 to 2025, localized 100 percent of design, construction, and operation technology and about 70 percent of core equipment, covering ultraviolet oxidation, membrane degassing, and ion exchange resins, per environment ministry figures reported by Water Journal in January 2025. That 70 percent tells a foreign supplier how little is left inside the plant.
The demonstration plant sits at SK siltron’s Gumi Plant 2 and produces 2,400 cubic meters a day. Hansung Cleantec designed and built it as the national project contractor selected in 2021, and K-water supplied the operating technology. Domestic ultrapure water first entered a semiconductor production process there in December 2024, per Energy Economy Daily, and the technology transfer to SK siltron was marked in May 2026. That reference site is changing hands: Doosan agreed on 31 July 2026 to buy 70.61 percent of SK siltron from SK for KRW 2.3 trillion, closing on or before the end of January 2027, which takes the program’s flagship user out of the SK group.
Phase 2 launched in May 2026 targeting 90 percent or more localization across all ultrapure water production and supply steps by 2030, adding piping materials, low-energy demonstration facilities, and analytical technology at parts-per-trillion resolution, per Aju Business Daily’s May 2026 report. Trace analytics is what a foreign instrument maker sells into today, and it is on that list.
Read it the way the wider localization push in the Korea semiconductor industry guide reads. A funded domestic challenger in your exact category is a headwind no pricing strategy fixes, so take the category out of the addressable estimate. Where no domestic alternative exists, the same policy pays foreign suppliers who localize in Korea.
How Does a Foreign Ultrapure Water Supplier Get Qualified?
On the fab’s clock, and it opens with paperwork. Group vendor registration comes first, and a purchase order issues at Samsung Device Solutions or SK hynix only after a supplier clears it. Samsung Electronics takes new supplier proposals through the N-SRM open sourcing system at secbuy.com, and for a semiconductor supplier the entry point is DS N-SRM at dsnsrm.secbuy.com. SK hynix runs registration through its GPIS partner portal, where a submission passes purchasing review and review by the relevant Technical Support Center, with a credit rating threshold among the criteria. Financial screening and compliance review sit here, ahead of technical qualification. This stage routinely adds months and is the gate foreign suppliers are most often surprised by.
After that, a new supplier generally runs 12 to 18 months or longer from first technical meeting to production release, as the fab qualification process in Korea sets out in stages.
Water systems carry one structural complication. The UPW loop is a live utility feeding every wet tool, so evaluation happens on side streams, test skids, a dedicated tool loop, or a new construction phase. That ties supplier entry to build schedules and gives the Pyeongtaek and Yongin timelines their commercial weight.
Compliance runs in parallel. Resins, membranes, and any chemistry entering the loop can trigger registration under K-REACH. Electrical equipment may require KC certification. Korean-language safety data sheets are a legal requirement under the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
Service commitment is the last gate. A UPW excursion stops wet processing across the line, so response expectations are measured in hours around the clock with spares held in Korea, at a cost set out in the guide to after-sales service in Korean semiconductor procurement.
Two things belong in the first meeting. Reference installations at named fabs anywhere, with whatever performance data the customer will let you share, because Korean utility engineers evaluate on comparable operating conditions. And an honest scope: a membrane module, an online TOC analyzer, or a degassing element pitched to the system houses, contractors, and operators who assemble plants, usually through a representative chosen on the criteria in the guide to choosing a semiconductor distributor in Korea.
Data current as of September 2026 and refreshed annually.
Frequently Asked Questions
What purity does semiconductor ultrapure water require? Korean fab spec sheets state resistivity of 18.2 megohm-cm or greater at 25 degrees Celsius, the rounded physical limit for pure water. An October 2025 AZoM interview with Mettler Toledo puts total organic carbon at or below 1 part per billion, silica at or below 0.5 parts per billion, and dissolved oxygen at or below 10 parts per billion. Ions are specified per species in nanograms per litre.
How much water does a Korean semiconductor fab use per day? Korean government planning allows 150,000 to 200,000 tons of industrial water a day per fabrication plant, the same number in cubic meters, per the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment plan reported by The Korea Times in July 2026. That is a gross site allocation. Veolia lists 108,528 cubic meters a day of ultrapure water across SK hynix’s Icheon and Cheongju sites.
Who supplies ultrapure water systems to Samsung and SK hynix? Kurita, Organo, and Nomura Micro Science hold the core plant business across Asian semiconductor manufacturing. Veolia operates ultrapure water and wastewater treatment for SK hynix at Icheon and Cheongju. Construction usually runs through in-group affiliates, Samsung E&A and Samsung C&T at Samsung and SK ecoplant at SK, alongside contractors such as Kolon Global.
Is Korea’s localization program closing the market to foreign suppliers? In targeted categories, yes. Phase 1 localized 100 percent of design, construction, and operation technology and about 70 percent of core equipment by 2025, and Phase 2 targets 90 percent or more across all ultrapure water production and supply steps by 2030. Advanced membranes and specialized instrumentation remain the openings, and Phase 2 puts parts-per-trillion analytics on the localization list.
Inquivix Technologies represents global clean-process suppliers inside Korea, covering hydrogen, ozone, and ultrapure water systems for wafer cleaning and oxidation, with distribution, technical localization, and fab-side coordination. Its guide to ultrapure water systems in semiconductor manufacturing takes the technical view. To discuss where your water technology fits against Korean demand, contact Joon K Lee at joon@joonklee.com.
