South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT recently announced that it would invest $642.5 million (826.2 billion won) until 2030 to boost companies developing advanced AI processors, TechCrunch reports.

The Korean government wants to solidify its position as a major player in the expanding global market for next-generation AI chips.

Korea Braces for AI Boom

The Korean government's massive AI investment will include the following:

• Building additional data centers.
• Cooperating with AI chip startups.
• Engaging with cloud service providers.

The initiative will be a part of the K-Cloud Task and the Korea Digital Strategy, a roadmap for six key technologies-AI, AI semiconductors, 5G and 6G connectivity, quantum, metaverse, and cybersecurity-that was launched in September 2022.

By 2030, South Korea intends to boost its share of the market for AI chips to 20%.

As part of its strategy, Seoul plans to construct two data centers, which will be referred to as neural process unit (NPU) farms. The city will begin hiring AI chipmakers and cloud firms as early as April.

These data centers are not going to use any foreign artificial intelligence chips and are not slated to open until 2024 at the earliest.

Three South Korean AI chipmakers, Rebellions, Sapeon Korea, and FuriosaAI, are reportedly teaming up with cloud providers Naver Cloud, KT Cloud, KaKao Cloud, and NHN Cloud to compete for contracts at the data centers.

Compared to Nvidia's A100 chips which are explicitly designed for Chatbot AI applications, Rebellion AI's chip uses only 20% as much energy, Wionews highlights.

Korea's K-Cloud Project

The K-Cloud project is a key feature of the Korea Digital Strategy, with the overarching goal of improving the quality of both public and private AI and cloud services through the local development of high-speed, low-power AI semiconductors and their implementation in data centers.

The announced K-Cloud project is the initial stage of the project, which is a demonstration of applying domestic neural processing units to data centers and providing cloud-based artificial intelligence services based on Internet resource sharing.

It is a project that will begin with a public offering of 37.6 billion won (7 projects) in 2023 by connecting the existing AI/Internet-based resource-sharing cloud service development project with a tentative investment of 100 billion won by 2025.

A Non-English ChatGPT AI Chatbot?

While the K-Cloud project will help South Korea gain a foothold in the AI chip market, local Korean tech companies such as Naver and Kakao are also eyeing to create a ChatGPT-like program for non-English speaking countries with their capabilities in search engine and messenger services.

KoreaJoongAngDaily reports that while the English version of ChatGPT responds to English questions with a high level of sophistication, the Korean version of the service is not as satisfactory. This could give competitors in the same region a chance to fill a niche market for AI chatbots.

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