The Public Growth Fund will directly invest 560 billion won in the artificial intelligence (AI) corporations "Upstage."
The Financial Services Commission said on the 3rd that it approved a 560 billion won direct equity investment in Upstage at the fund management deliberation committee held on the 30th. The structure includes 100 billion won from the advanced strategic industry fund, 30 billion won from the Korea Development Bank, and 430 billion won in private investment.
Upstage is a venture corporations that builds AI solutions for corporations and governments and large language models (LLMs), and is evaluated as a unicorn corporations with a corporate value of 1 trillion won. In the government's "independent AI foundation model project," it was the only venture or small and medium-sized corporations to pass the first-round evaluation.
The Financial Services Commission (FSC) said it plans to secure high-quality data through cooperation with a leading domestic portal company and, based on that, refine the performance of a Korean language–specialized model.
Along with this, an equity investment was also approved for building a national AI computing center at the Solaseado Data Center Park in Haenam County, South Jeolla Province. The public and private sectors will jointly establish a special purpose company (SPC) to introduce 15,000 cutting-edge AI Semiconductor units, including graphics processing units (GPUs) and Neural Processing Unit (NPU) chips. With this decision, funding for the SPC's 400 billion won capital was finalized, and up to 2 trillion won in loans will be pursued going forward.
Investment in secondary battery materials will proceed in parallel. A total of 250 billion won in low-interest loans, including 200 billion won from the advanced strategic industry fund, will be provided to FutureGraph, a subsidiary of POSCO FUTURE M. FutureGraph plans to establish an annual production base of 37,000 tons of spherical graphite in the Saemangeum National Industrial Complex. Spherical graphite is a key intermediate material that determines the performance and energy density of secondary battery anodes.
In addition, 85 billion won will be provided to mid-sized corporations STgen Bio to expand biosimilar production facilities, and a 16.5 billion won low-interest loan was approved for Foosung, a corporations producing hydrogen fluoride gas for semiconductor processes.
The Public Growth Fund approved 8.4 trillion won in support for a total of 11 projects through April. The Financial Services Commission (FSC) said, "We will select projects with large industrial ripple effects and policy significance and regularly announce them as mega projects, and we plan to provide constant support for a wide range of funding needs."