[2026-05-30] Korea economic revitalization package — 962-billion-won Saedoyak debt buyback, Furiosa AI 370-billion-won Growth-Fund investment, and a redesigned U-turn regime for overseas factories

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Seoul, May 30, 2026 — On May 29, the Korean government bundled three separate announcements that, together, define an economic-revitalization package across households, industrial policy and advanced-technology investment. The Financial Services Commission (FSC) and the Korea Asset Management Corporation (KAMCO) closed the 5th round of buybacks under the Saedoyak Fund, taking on 962 billion won (about 720 million USD) of long-overdue household debt from 116,000 borrowers. The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy unveiled a redesigned policy to bring overseas Korean factories back home. And the Korea National Growth Fund approved five new financings, including a 370-billion-won direct investment in Furiosa AI, a domestic AI-semiconductor company. Together they form a layered recovery package — household debt relief, industrial re-shoring, and sovereign-AI capital — released in the same week the Lee Jae-myung administration completes its first year.

1) Saedoyak Fund: 5th buyback of 962 billion won, 750,000 cumulative beneficiaries

The FSC announced on May 29 that the Saedoyak Fund — run by KAMCO since the program’s launch — had purchased the latest tranche of long-overdue retail debt. The 5th round targets unsecured individual receivables of up to 50 million won that have been in default for at least 7 years. This single round covers roughly 116,000 borrowers and 962 billion won. Cumulative beneficiaries since the program’s inception have now reached 750,000.

Three features make this round particularly significant. First, collection stops immediately upon purchase by the Saedoyak Fund, removing the constant pressure of private collection calls that trap borrowers in long-tail distress. Second, debts held by the most vulnerable groups — including recipients of the Basic Livelihood Security benefits — are written off without a separate repayment-capacity review. This is closer to legal extinguishment than to deferral. Third, the 5th round expands the seller base materially: the Saedoyak Fund purchased from the agricultural NH Asset Management Corporation, the mutual-credit sector (MG Community Credit Cooperatives, Suhyup, Shinhyup, Forest Cooperative), private collection firms and public agencies. That brings rural, older and non-Seoul borrowers systematically inside the recovery umbrella for the first time.

For scale, Korea’s Credit Counseling and Recovery Service typically handles roughly 140,000 to 150,000 personal debt-restructuring applications per year. A cumulative 750,000 beneficiaries through the Saedoyak Fund is several years of equivalent demand processed through a direct-purchase, write-off-oriented channel instead of voluntary workouts or court-led rehabilitation.

2) Redesigned ‘U-turn’ regime for overseas Korean factories

At the May 29 Economic Ministers’ Meeting chaired by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Koo Yoon-cheol, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy unveiled a new framework titled “Redesign and Promotion of Domestic Return (U-turn).” The official briefing explicitly framed the policy as a response to intensifying global protectionism and supply-chain reorganization. Rather than treating U-turn as a one-off relocation incentive, the new design elevates it to a core national task aimed at activating regional investment and securing domestic capability in advanced strategic sectors.

Four pillars structure the redesign:

  • Re-scoping U-turn recognition — extending eligibility beyond simple new/expansion of domestic facilities to include R&D and production hubs in advanced strategic sectors.
  • Restructured U-turn subsidies — moving away from facility-investment ratios toward a multi-dimensional scorecard that weights regional investment, employment impact and technology spillover.
  • Stronger evaluation and rationalized performance requirements — staged execution recognized in line with global supply-chain timelines, instead of binary milestones.
  • Strategic attraction with hands-on execution support — early identification of credible candidate firms with site, permitting and talent-matching support from the central government.

The international context matters. With the United States expanding its Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) incentive framework and the European Union enforcing the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), Korean manufacturers face a more crowded global subsidy race. Without a comparable domestic mechanism, advanced strategic production risks shifting permanently offshore. The new U-turn regime is best read not as a job policy alone but as an industrial-security policy tightly coupled to the regional investment agenda.

3) Korea National Growth Fund: Furiosa AI, SK Bio and three more

On May 28, the FSC convened the Korea National Growth Fund’s Steering Committee, which approved five financings: three second-wave mega-projects and two general-track projects. The headline deal is a 370-billion-won direct equity investment in Furiosa AI — a domestic AI inference accelerator company — using the Advanced Strategic Industry Fund. Around the same vehicle, the Growth Fund is on track to mobilize roughly 800 billion won in total for the Furiosa AI program. Other approvals include next-generation bio/vaccine facility build-out and R&D financing — with SK Bio-related capital — and dedicated funding for domestic AI semiconductor development.

The timeline runs alongside the Growth Fund’s broader sovereign-AI agenda. In April, the Strategy Committee — the Growth Fund’s advisory body — selected six second-wave mega-projects, including bio/display sectors expected to produce early commercial results and the flagship “Sovereign AI Ecosystem Expansion” project. The May 28 Steering Committee converted that pipeline into actual capital deployment: next-generation bio/vaccine R&D and the domestic AI semiconductor program both moved into the funded phase. From May, the general-track pipeline started running in parallel, marking the first quarter in which the Growth Fund’s design → selection → funding cycle is operating end-to-end.

Furiosa AI’s specific role matters strategically. The company develops domestic AI inference chips targeted at large-language-model workloads, an area where Korea has been heavily dependent on Nvidia GPUs. A direct public-capital injection at the 370-billion-won level, bundled inside a broader 800-billion-won program, signals that sovereign AI is no longer a slogan but a capital commitment. Combined with the parallel approval of bio/vaccine and AI-semiconductor R&D, the Growth Fund is explicitly building a domestic stack from silicon to model to service.

Why these three policies belong in one package

The three measures look unrelated on the surface — consumer-credit relief, an industrial policy reset, and a sovereign-AI investment — but they share a common policy grammar. Each one institutionalizes automatic, mechanical follow-through rather than depending on discretionary, case-by-case approval. The Saedoyak Fund hard-codes collection halts and write-off paths for distressed households. The U-turn regime hard-codes a multi-dimensional scoring system instead of one-off subsidy bargaining. The Growth Fund hard-codes a multi-stage capital allocation channel from strategy committee to steering committee. In a year in which the global environment — protectionism, supply-chain reorganization, AI-compute scarcity — is forcing every advanced economy to make permanent structural choices, Korea’s Friday announcement bundle is a clear statement that the recovery toolkit is being wired into the regular machinery of the state, not deployed as anniversary headlines.

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