To strengthen the country’s position in the artificial intelligence boom, Korea laid out details of its so-called “K-Cloud Project” aimed at the development of locally manufactured high-speed AI chips. This comes amid high demand for the chips needed to train the latest generative AI systems such as ChatGPT that has prompted Nvidia shares to soar.
The first phase of the project was unveiled at a meeting presided by the Minister of Science and ICT Lee Jong-ho on Monday at NHN Cloud’s headquarters in Pangyo. The ministry had initially released the three-phase plan last December to spend a total of 826.2 billion won(US$ 633.7 million) through 2030 to develop the AI chips for data center application.
Under the first phase, the government plans to spend a total of 100 billion won by 2025 to help the application of Neural Network Processing Units(NPU) to data centers and carry out demonstration projects of cloud-based AI services. NPUs are high-performance, low-powered processors optimized for AI algorithms such as deep learning.
The capacity of NPU-driven data centers are doubled compared to the initial government plan, reaching a total of 39.9 PF. The project will be realized by participating Korean companies including chip companies Furiosa AI, Rebellion and Sapion Korea as well as Naver Cloud, KT Cloud and NHN Cloud. As for AI service developers, Upstage, Raon Road, Nota Synergy AI and Superb AI are participating in the consortium.
A lion’s share of the K-Cloud Project’s 22PF capacity AI-chip based data center is being spearheaded by NHN Cloud. Whereas, Naver Cloud, which is building a data center of 9PF, will be verifying demonstration services of the Furiosa AI chips in the fields of language processing, education and safety control.
The ministry is also planning to set aside 1 trillion won (US$ 768 million) to conduct a feasibility study, focused on the development of data center infrastructure, hardware and computing software as well as AI semiconductor-specific cloud technology.
Minister Lee said the government will spare no support for the training of experts that’ll help raise domestic competitiveness of AI chips to enter the global market. The Korean government is to unveil next month plans to collaborate with Google to operate an AI developer training program as an official development project for digital talent.
In February, Korea’s ICT Ministry announced a total of 44.5 billion won (US$ 34.2 million) investments into data centers by 2025 to facilitate the integration of AI capabilities of regional universities, businesses and research institutions.
