S.Korea's gov't to allocate 10,000 Nvidia GPUs to SMEs, startups, AI projects starting Feb.
The government said Thursday it plans to allocate some 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) procured from Nvidia Corp. to small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs), startups and academic and state artificial intelligence (AI) projects starting in February, Yonhap reports.
The plan was unveiled as part of the government's broader strategy to foster a robust domestic AI ecosystem at a meeting of science and technology–related ministers chaired by Science Minister Bae Kyung-hoon, the government said.
The government recently spent 1.4 trillion won (US$947.2 million) to purchase some 10,000 GPUs from Nvidia, marking the first phase of a plan to acquire 50,000 units by 2030.
The GPUs will be configured as a large-scale cluster to support high-speed computing for AI model training and inference.
Applications for AI development projects from industry, academia and research institutions will be accepted online until Jan. 28, with support of up to 256 H200 GPUs or 128 B200 GPUs per project.
Some 6,000 B200 GPUs, scheduled for later delivery, will be allocated to a nationwide initiative to develop homegrown AI foundation models, the government added.
The allocation follows Nvidia Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jensen Huang's announcement in late October that the company would deploy 260,000 GPUs to South Korea in partnership with the government and major companies, including Samsung Electronics Co., to build large-scale AI factories in the country.
Under the plan, the government will use some 50,000 GPUs to build a national sovereign AI platform, while Samsung Electronics, SK Group and Hyundai Motor Group are each set to receive 50,000 units. Naver Corp. will receive 60,000.
Earlier, Nvidia presented a package of new open AI models and developer tools aimed at accelerating research in autonomous driving and robotics, underlining the company’s broader push to build what it calls the foundation for physical AI.
