Normally, governments stockpile fuel or food in order to keep their economies running. As the AI arms race picks up, South Korea is considering building a reserve of a different strategic commodity: computer chips.
Seoul will secure 10,000 high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) within the year to ensure South Korea can keep up with global AI developments, acting president Choi Sang-mok said Monday.
Choi, who is also serving as the country’s deputy prime minister and finance minister, said at a government meeting that the rivalry for AI supremacy has shifted from being solely between companies to become a contest among nations.
Yonhap, a South Korean news agency, reported that Seoul hopes to acquire Nvidia’s H100 and H200 processors, two of the leading chips used to power AI applications. The country had about 2,000 H100s at the end of 2023, according to Yonhap.
The country hopes to acquire the GPUs through a public-private partnership, and will accelerate the launch of a national AI computing center set to open in 2027.
National AI projects
South Korea is the latest country to adopt a plan to expand the infrastructure that supports AI.
In late January, the U.S. announced Stargate, a $500 billion project to invest in new data centers across the country. The initiative is backed by major U.S. tech firms like OpenAI and Oracle.
Earlier this month, France announced that the United Arab Emirates could invest as much as 50 billion euros ($52.3 billion) in a data center that would form the core of a new AI “campus” in France, potentially the largest in Europe.
Several other countries, including both major economies like China and Japan, and smaller ones like Singapore and Malaysia, have all adopted AI strategies.
Why does South Korea want a GPU stockpile?
GPUs are some of the key components needed to run generative AI applications.
Last month, the outgoing Biden administration proposed new rules to govern how economies get access to GPUs. These processors are often designed by U.S. companies like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which Washington has tried to leverage to regulate the flow of semiconductor exports to countries like China.
The new framework, announced the week before President Biden left office, splits the world into three tiers. South Korea is part of the first tier: U.S. allies that are essentially exempt from export restrictions on advanced computer chips. Second-tier countries will face a cap on how many chips they can get; third-tier countries, reserved for U.S. rivals like Russia and China, are effectively barred from acquiring these chips legally.
The proposed rules have yet to become law; the Trump administration will make the final decision on the new rules once the set 120-day comment period comes to a close.
