The government will provide 50 trillion won in financial support over the next five years to foster domestic AI Semiconductor corporations, dubbed "K-NVIDIA." The plan is to target niches in the global AI Semiconductor market with low-power, high-efficiency Neural Processing Unit (NPU) technology and propel Korea to become one of the world's top three AI powers.
On the 17th, the Financial Services Commission and the Ministry of Science and ICT held a joint public-private meeting at the Korea Press Center with Korea Development Bank (KDB) and leaders from major domestic AI Semiconductor corporations including Rebellions, FuriosaAI, HyperAccel, DeepX, and Mobilint to promote the "Public Growth Fund K-NVIDIA Fostering Project." The meeting was a follow-up to the "AI Semiconductor industry leap strategy" announced in Dec. last year and was organized to discuss concrete investment strategies to support the design and production of domestically made AI Semiconductors.
The government believes that the massive power consumption and high operating expense of GPUs (graphics processing units), which dominate the global market, have reached their limits. Accordingly, it plans to secure low-power, low-cost NPU technology optimized for the AI inference market to seize the turning point in the global market. Bae Kyung-hoon, vice minister of the Ministry of Science and ICT, said, "Competition to secure next-generation NPU technology to overcome the limits of GPUs is fierce," and noted, "We will focus policy support on the domestic NPU industry so that our corporations can leap forward as global leaders."
The Financial Services Commission has detailed a plan to supply large-scale funds using the Public Growth Fund to enable the AI industry's long-term scale-up. Lee Eog-weon, chair of the Financial Services Commission, announced, "We will supply 50 trillion won over the next five years to the AI and semiconductor sectors, including about 10 trillion won this year alone, as long-term patient capital." The support funds will be deployed according to a stage-by-stage investment strategy, from initial infrastructure build-out through operation and maintenance.
Leaders of AI Semiconductor corporations attending the meeting presented roadmaps for next-generation, ultra-low-power, high-performance NPU products and stressed that, if large-scale investment resources are secured in time, they can move up mass production and capture the golden time for entering the global market. Korea Development Bank (KDB) also pledged bold investments across the semiconductor value chain—including fabless, foundry, and packaging—as a policy finance institution.
In addition to "fostering K-NVIDIA" and "building a national AI computing center," the government plans to actively support the establishment of a physical AI ecosystem and the acceleration of public and industrial AX (AI transformation). The Ministry of Science and ICT and the Financial Services Commission said they will continue to identify subsequent mega projects in AI and build an efficient investment system linked with private capital.