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Amazon Web Services aims to expand presence of its AI chips in Korea

Published: 05 Mar. 2025, 19:05

LEE JAE-LIM
lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr

Ham Kee-ho, the country managing director of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Korea, speaks at a press event held in AWS Korea's office building in southern Seoul on March 5. [AMAZON WEB SERVICES]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Korea aims to expand the adoption of its in-house AI chips for training and inference among domestic clients this year, vying to compete with Nvidia’s dominant processors in the market.

“Nvidia is not the only GPU provider,” said Ham Kee-ho, the country managing director of AWS Korea, at a press event held at its office building in southern Seoul on Wednesday to outline business strategies for 2025.

“We have been producing our own GPUs for a long time, with dedicated chips for training, Trainium, and for inference, Inferentia, already in place. One of our key goals this year is to expand the adoption rate of the two chips in the Korean market.”

The U.S. cloud service provider is collaborating with domestic companies to conduct training tests and pilot projects, with concrete results to be announced “soon.”

AWS offers servers equipped with 16 Trainium2 chips, and supports large-scale AI model training through “UltraServers,” which bundle four servers together.

The company is also developing an AI supercomputer with Anthropic, under the code name Project Rainier, which will utilize hundreds of thousands of Trainium2 chips to significantly enhance AI training capabilities.

Anthropic’s training of its Claude 3.5 Haiku model was 60 percent faster using Tranium2 than other processors, and AI coding startup Poolside leveraged Trainium to cut down costs by 40 percent compared to Nvidia’s H100 GPUs, according to AWS.

The company is also undergoing an evaluation to receive cloud security certification (CSAP), a mandatory security verification for private cloud service providers (CSPs) before their services can be adopted by public institutions. Other foreign CSPs such as Microsoft and Google Cloud have obtained this certification.

"The CSAP certification progress is progressing as planned,” Ham briefly stated regarding the matter.

AWS previously announced an investment of 7.85 trillion won ($5.4 billion) in Korea’s cloud computing infrastructure by 2027.

“We have already invested 3 trillion won,” Ham said. “The adoption rate of generative AI for Korean companies is relatively faster than global companies.”

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]