 |
| Source: NVIDIA. Image depicting Korea's AI infrastructure. |
NVIDIA is working with South Korea to expand the nation’s AI infrastructure with some 260,000 NVIDIA GPUs across its sovereign clouds and AI factories. Built with public- and private-sector deployments, the infrastructure is the basis for AI-enabled economic growth and innovation across Korea’s industries, including automotive, manufacturing and telecommunications.
The announcement marks one of the largest national investments in agentic and physical AI to date, and is backed by the South Korean Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT), Samsung Electronics, SK Group, Hyundai Motor Group, NAVER Cloud, LG and more, said Scott Martin, NVIDIA corporate communications team, in a blog post. Physical AI refers to AI-powered physical devices such as robots and drones.
At the heart of the effort is a sovereign AI infrastructure initiative led by MSIT, which will deploy up to 50,000 of the latest NVIDIA GPUs across an upcoming National AI Computing Center as well as Korean cloud service and IT providers NHN Cloud, Kakao Corp. and NVIDIA Cloud Partner NAVER Cloud. The initial wave includes 13,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, with more to follow in the coming years.
Research institutes, startups and AI companies will be able to use the sovereign infrastructure to build models and applications, supporting Korea’s national strategy to boost AI capabilities and infrastructure.
Private-sector organisations Samsung, SK Group and Hyundai Motor Group are also building AI factories with tens of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs apiece. The combined infrastructure will power an AI transformation across manufacturing, mobility, telecommunications and robotics:
Samsung Electronics is building an AI factory with over 50,000 GPUs to accelerate its AI, semiconductor and digital transformation roadmap. The company is using NVIDIA CUDA-X, the NVIDIA cuLitho library to accelerate computational lithography, NVIDIA Nemotron post-training datasets and NVIDIA Omniverse to build digital twins that improve the speed and yields for semiconductor manufacturing.
Samsung is also using NVIDIA Cosmos, NVIDIA Isaac Sim and NVIDIA Isaac Lab as well as Isaac GR00T to advance its home robot development portfolio. NVIDIA Cosmos is a platform for physical AI. Isaac GR00T is a platform for developing general-purpose robot models, while Isaac Sim is a simulation environment for testing and training robot models, and Isaac Lab is an open-source framework for robot learning.
SK Group is designing an AI factory capable of hosting up to 60,000 GPUs to advance semiconductor research, development and production, as well as cloud infrastructure to support digital twin and AI agent development. The group is also behind Asia’s first industrial AI cloud, powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs.
SK Telecom plans to provide sovereign infrastructure featuring NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, enabling domestic manufacturers to tap into NVIDIA Omniverse. The company will offer industrial cloud infrastructure to accelerate digital twin and robotics projects for startups, enterprises and government agencies.
Hyundai Motor Group and NVIDIA are entering a new phase of deepened collaboration and will codevelop AI capabilities across mobility, smart factories and on-device semiconductors, powered by 50,000 Blackwell GPUs for AI model training, validations and deployment in the manufacturing, autonomous driving, and robotics sectors.
The company plans to use the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor compute platform for autonomous vehicles, the NeMo software suite for managing the AI agent lifecycle, the Nemotron family of open-source models for building specialised AI agentic systems, and Omniverse to simulate factory operations.
In support of the Korean government’s initiative to build a national physical AI cluster, Hyundai Motor Group and NVIDIA will work closely with government stakeholders to accelerate ecosystem development. This will result in an approximately US$3 billion investment to advance the physical AI landscape in Korea. Key initiatives include the creation of an NVIDIA AI Technology Center, the Hyundai Motor Group Physical AI Application Center and regional AI data centres.
NAVER Cloud is also expanding its NVIDIA AI infrastructure and plans to deploy over 60,000 GPUs — including NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell and other NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs — for sovereign and physical AI. NAVER Cloud is preparing for the next stage of sovereign AI development in Korea, powered by NVIDIA Nemotron open models running on its NVIDIA AI infrastructure. NAVER Cloud plans to develop industry-specific AI models like shipbuilding and security, with a focus on inclusive AI for Korea’s citizens.
The Korean government is also investing in AI research. MSIT is leading a Sovereign AI Foundation Models project in collaboration with LG AI Research, NAVER Cloud, NC AI, SK Telecom, Upstage and NVIDIA. The initiative will use NVIDIA NeMo software and open NVIDIA Nemotron datasets to develop Korean language models with reasoning, speech, and other capabilities.
LG is working with NVIDIA to foster physical AI technology development and support the physical AI ecosystem. NVIDIA and LG are collaborating to support academia and startups with LG’s EXAONE models, including the EXAONE Path healthcare model — built with the MONAI framework — to support cancer diagnosis. The company is also working with NVIDIA to support physical AI startups and academic research.
The Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) is partnering with NVIDIA to establish a Center of Excellence for quantum computing and scientific research. Using its sixth-generation HANGANG supercomputer, the new NVIDIA NVQLink open architecture for connecting quantum processors and GPU supercomputing, and the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform, KISTI will explore quantum error correction, applications, plus physics-informed AI models and scientific foundation models built with the open-source NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo framework.
In addition, NVIDIA is working with industries, academia and research institutions in Korea on next-generation mobile networks. In a move to drive AI radio access networks (AI-RAN) and 6G infrastructure, NVIDIA is working with Samsung, SK Telecom, ETRI, KT, LGU+ and Yonsei University to intelligent, low-power AI-RAN network technology that can reduce computing costs and extend device battery life.
The key is these goals is to offloading GPU computation tasks from devices to the network’s base stations. This reduces energy costs and extending battery life — a critical enabler for widespread robotics adoption.
To support Korea’s next generation of AI companies, NVIDIA is expanding the NVIDIA Inception programme with a new startup alliance. It will participate in the N-Up AI startup incubation programme operated by the Korea Ministry of SMEs and Startups.
Members will gain access to accelerated computing infrastructure from NVIDIA Cloud Partners like SK Telecom, along with support from NVIDIA Inception and VC Alliance firms including IMM Investment, Korea Investment Partners and SBVA.
As part of the alliance, a new Center of Excellence powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs will help startups build physical AI applications, while the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute will offer AI upskilling programmes to train Korea’s future workforce.
“Korea’s leadership in technology and manufacturing positions it at the heart of the AI industrial revolution — where accelerated computing infrastructure becomes as vital as power grids and broadband,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.
“Just as Korea’s physical factories have inspired the world with sophisticated ships, cars, chips and electronics, the nation can now produce intelligence as a new export that will drive global transformation.”
“Now that AI has gone beyond mere innovation and become the foundation of future industries, South Korea stands at the threshold of transformation,” said Bae Kyung-hoon, Korea Deputy PM and Minister of Science and Information and Communication Technologies.
“Expanding our national AI infrastructure and developing technologies with NVIDIA is an investment that will further reinforce South Korea’s strengths, including its manufacturing capabilities. This will support South Korea’s prosperity as it strives to become one of the top three global AI powerhouses.”
No comments:
Post a Comment