South Korea's Grand Plan To Join The AI Big Time

2025-11-28 12:01:26

(MENAFN- Asia Times) Less than a month after Nvidia announced the plan, the government of South Korea has called the first meeting of a working group that will supervise the radical expansion of the nation's AI infrastructure and advance President Lee Jae-myung's ambition of making South Korea one of the world's top three AI nations, along with the US and China.

Lee also hopes that AI will spark new robust growth for the South Korean economy, which has recently been hit by Donald Trump's tariffs and associated forced investment in the US. South Korean GDP grew 1.4% in 2023 and 2.0% in 2024, and the Bank of Korea now estimates that it will expand by only 1.0% in 2025.

Year-on-year growth accelerated from 0.6% in the second quarter of this year to 1.7% in the third, but that is still more like perpetually low-growth Japan than the“Asian Tiger” that South Korea used to be.

Chaired by Second Science Minister Ryu Je-myung, the working group includes senior executives from Samsung Electroncs, Hyundai Motor, SK Telecom and Naver Cloud. According to the Korean press, they discussed the deployment of 260,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs and ways to strengthen the nation's AI ecosystem. When completed, this project will reportedly increase South Korea's installed GPU capacity by about fivefold.

On September 8, President Lee officially launched the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy Committee, which oversees the implementation of national AI strategy and coordinates the activities of different parts of the government.

The committee is comprised of more than 30 private-sector members assigned to subcommittees in charge of AI infrastructure, data, applications, social adaptation, global cooperation, science and skills development, defense and security.

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