Finance Ministry seeking to propel growth with flying cars, quantum cloud service

Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Choi Sang-mok speaks during the Emergency Ministerial Meeting on Economic Affairs held on Wednesday at the government complex in central Seoul. [YONHAP]

Korea aims to switch on a quantum computing cloud service later this year and begin a test run of flying taxis in the greater Seoul region starting in August, the Ministry of Economy and Finance said in its latest plan to fuel new growth engines for the country.

The ambitious initiative for 2024, released on Wednesday during the Emergency Ministerial Meeting on Economic Affairs chaired by Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Choi Sang-mok, is part of the New Growth 4.0 Strategy announced in 2022. The ministry also released the government’s plan to support high-tech industrial clusters.

The annual plan for key projects this year named five major focuses in the technology category: future mobility, space exploration, quantum technology, medicine and healthcare, and energy.

The government will streamline the regulative framework to begin performance verification for urban air mobility (UAM) vehicles, widely referred to as flying cars, in the greater Seoul region in August as it aims to make the technology available in the market by 2025.

The ministry will also begin laying the legal and safety groundwork for self-driving cars with the goal of having self-driving passenger vehicles with Level 4 autonomous driving technology hit the road by 2027.

On the five-level autonomous driving scale, a Level 4 self-driving vehicle can drive itself within certain parameters, and driver input is an option.

Korea’s space agency, considered the country’s version of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is set to be launched in May to spearhead government-led space initiatives.

Moreover, a domestically-developed cloud service powered by a 20-qubit quantum computer will come online in the latter half of this year. The government aims to speed up the development of a 50-qubit quantum computer for 2026.

Under the daily life innovation segment, this year’s plans include accelerating the establishment of an AI chip-powered data center and launching the country’s first fully automated port in Busan in March.

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