800 billion won of Korean taxpayer money going into AI chips

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The government is pouring over 800 billion won ($611.6 million) into AI chip development through 2030.

The investment is part of the project to establish “K-Cloud” infrastructure powered by domestically-developed semiconductors.

The Ministry of Science and ICT on Monday held a strategy meeting for AI semiconductor development with Minister Lee Jong-ho in attendance, and announced its eight-year plan to develop an advanced AI chip with ultra-low latency and high energy efficiency for cloud computing.

Representatives from Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, as well as local AI chip companies, including Sapeon, FuriosaAI, and Rebellions, and cloud service companies, such as KT and Naver, joined the Monday event.

The goal is to achieve a level of technology equivalent to that from the United States by 2030, from the current 89.2 percent, and increase the domestically-developed AI chip share in the local market to 80 percent.

While Korea had a 56 percent share in the global memory chip market, it took only 3 percent in the system-on-chips market, which includes AI chips, according to the ICT Ministry’s data released in June.

AI chips are purpose-built to perform very specific calculations as fast as possible.

The ICT Ministry outlined its plan to invest 826.2 billion won in the AI chip research and development from 2023 to 2030.

The ministry will improve domestically built Neural Processing Units (NPUs) — which emulate the neural networks of a human brain — and deploy them in local data centers by 2025.

By 2028, the government aims to build a DRAM-based Processing-In-Memory (PIM) chip and a PIM chip based on a non-volatile memory with ultra-low energy consumption by 2030.

In PIM chips, processing and memory are integrated, reducing latency and addressing the von Neumann bottleneck.

The goal is to push the domestically developed AI chip’s adoption rate at the local data centers to 80 percent by then.

The government will also develop the software needed to adopt AI chips at data centers.

Starting next year, the ministry plans to begin a test operation for NPU chip-powered data centers and digital services. Some 100 billion won will be invested by 2025.

The K-Cloud Alliance was launched on Monday. It is a private-government cooperation network with about 40 members, including government organizations, research institutions, AI chip companies and cloud service operators.

“Korea is top-tier in the memory chip, and based on such technological capabilities, we will be able to foster the AI chip sector, which is the core technology in the era of AI technology and the new growth engine for the chip industry,” Lee said.

Over 50 companies worldwide are developing AI chips, according to Gartner, which forecasts the global AI chip market to be $86.1 billion in size by 2026, more than double the market size of $34.7 billion in 2021.

BY SHIN HA-NEE [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]