The Public Growth Fund decided to lend 400 billion won at a low interest rate in the 3% range for Naver's artificial intelligence (AI) data center expansion and graphics processing unit (GPU) server adoption project.
The Financial Services Commission said on the 15th that it made this decision at the Public Growth Fund fund management deliberation committee. The project is for Naver to expand a data center in Sejong to advance its own large language model (LLM) and expand the adoption of AI in its search service, and to introduce the latest GPUs to the data center.
The Financial Services Commission (FSC) said, "Korean corporations have had a high level of dependence on global big tech corporations in developing AI models due to a lack of AI infrastructure facilities," and added, "To help the domestic AI industry reduce its dependence on global big tech and secure its own AI sovereignty, we decided to provide funding for domestic corporations' large-scale AI data center construction projects."
The Financial Services Commission (FSC) also decided to provide funding to SEMCNS, a semiconductor test process component manufacturing corporations located in North Chungcheong. This corporations is a leading producer that localized and manufactures ceramic space transformers (STF; Space Transformer) used in test equipment within the semiconductor ecosystem. The Financial Services Commission (FSC) said, "We approved the credit by applying streamlined procedures for small and midsize corporations based in the region."