Candidate site selection underway

The ministry has kicked off the process of choosing candidate riverside reservoirs (천변저류지) to buffer water supplies for industrial users, including AI data centers and semiconductor fabs. The name "riverside reservoir" for the initiative rests on a single media report based on an official's briefing and has not been confirmed in any publicly available official documents.

The ministry's push comes as water demand from semiconductor manufacturing and AI infrastructure grows in the southern and western regions of the country. Environment Minister Kim Sung-hwan has inspected semiconductor infrastructure sites in the southwest, according to a policy briefing image hosted on the government's press platform, and drought conditions — such as the exposed reservoir bed at the Unmun Dam in Cheongdo shown in press photography — have underlined the water supply pressures behind the policy.

Some procurement details still inaccessible

Details of related procurement notices, including a proposal request attached to a Jiwonchak notice and a pre-announcement of specifications on the Nara Market public procurement portal, could not be retrieved in full due to server timeouts and access failures, leaving the scope and timeline of the site selection work not fully documented.

The claim that the ministry has begun selecting two to three riverside reservoir sites is broadly consistent with available evidence, though the initiative's name and details depend on a single source briefing. On balance, the report stands as Mostly True.