Chairperson Lee Eog-weon of the Financial Services Commission (FSC) said on the 12th that because the path of artificial intelligence (AI) is not a short race that yields results in the near term, adventure capital and patient capital are essential, and finance must play that role.
The Chairperson stated accordingly at an AI corporations roundtable held that day at the headquarters of FuriosaAI in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, saying, the world is moving beyond simple technological competition and passing through an era of a massive AI transformation that determines the order of industry and the future of nations.
FuriosaAI is a fabless corporations specializing in AI Semiconductor design that drew attention when President Lee Jae-myung visited as his first official schedule during his presidential campaign. FuriosaAI is currently conducting a pre-IPO (pre-listing fundraising) worth 750 billion won and is reportedly planning to raise around 375 billion won from the Public Growth Fund.
The Chairperson said, AI is a new national infrastructure and a foundation for growth, like electricity and the internet, and it is rewriting productivity and competitiveness across industries, adding, securing independent compute infrastructure, data, and model capabilities is a matter of AI sovereignty and industrial security. The Chairperson continued, the Public Growth Fund is providing focused support to the AI industry, and in particular is making unprecedented direct investments in the hundreds of billions of won in leading domestic AI value-chain corporations such as Rebellions and Upstage, and added, projects such as the National AI Computing Center have also taken their first steps through public-private collaboration.
The Chairperson added, the Public Growth Fund included the K-Nvidia project as the first megaproject, and through the second megaproject prepared an investment execution plan that encompasses the entire value chain from semiconductor → data center → foundation model development and application service development as a Sovereign AI Project.
At the roundtable, the corporations in attendance introduced their company overviews and future investment plans and demonstrated products and services. FuriosaAI presented the real-time inference performance of Renegade (RNGD), a next-generation inference-specialized AI Semiconductor (NPU). According to FuriosaAI, Renegade achieves overwhelming performance per watt compared with the graphics processing units (GPUs) of global corporations, making it an alternative to address future power demand issues at AI data centers.
FuriosaAI said it plans to raise funds amounting to hundreds of billions of won through the ongoing capital increase round and use them for mass production of the second-generation semiconductor Renegade (RNGD) and for development of the third-generation semiconductor.
Next, Upstage, a venture that builds AI solutions for corporations and government and large language models (LLMs), explained plans to advance its next-generation B2B AI model and to develop Solar Open, an LLM model for the general public. The Public Growth Fund recently decided to invest a total of 560 billion won in Upstage, including 100 billion won from the Advanced Strategic Industry Fund, 30 billion won from the Korea Development Bank, and 430 billion won from private investors.
Lee Do-gyu, head of the Office of Information and Communications Policy at the Ministry of Science and ICT, who attended the roundtable, said, in securing sovereign AI, developing domestic AI Semiconductors and an independent AI foundation model project are national core tasks that must be pursued.