South Korea’s record exports underscore how the country’s factories have become a central node in determining how quickly artificial intelligence (AI) can scale globally, promising huge economic windfalls but also contributing to an increasingly unbalanced export portfolio.

The Korea Customs Service announced on Monday that exports in the first 20 days of June reached a record $62 billion, up 60.4% from a year earlier. Semiconductor exports surged 188.4% to $25.5 billion and accounted for 41.2% of all exports. The country’s trade surplus reached $17.5 billion.

The significance of those figures extends well beyond South Korea’s economy.

For much of the