The government will diversify its support to ensure that domestically produced artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductors based on neural processing units (NPUs) can be commercialized quickly in actual AI development and utilization environments.
On the 11th, the Ministry of Science and ICT held an explanation session for support projects targeting the AI semiconductor industry at the Korea Science and Technology Center in Gangnam, Seoul.
The government noted that it will invest 243.4 billion won, including 49.4 billion won in this year's supplementary budget, into AI semiconductor research and development, verification, and talent training.
Through the AX (AI conversion) verification support project, which will inject up to 3.86 billion won this year and 7.76 billion won next year, the aim is to transition AI services that have been commercialized or have prototypes based on foreign GPUs to domestically produced NPUs.
The goal is to transplant and optimize GPU-based AI services onto domestic AI semiconductors to verify whether they can deliver performance comparable to foreign GPUs in operating AI services.
Performance verification will be conducted in actual AI service-providing environments, such as industrial facilities and public infrastructure, or similar testbeds.
In addition, the government will support domestic AI semiconductor fabless companies in the progression of products to mass production level through the protection of semiconductor design intellectual property (IP), securing global partnerships, ensuring compatibility of operational software, and optimization.
The types of AI semiconductors eligible for the support project aimed at enhancing AI semiconductor functionality include autonomous driving, healthcare, Internet of Things (IoT), video AI models (VLM), and vision-language-action (VLA) models that serve as the basis for robotic actions.
Additionally, the government will undertake verification projects to transition devices in safety, home appliances, transportation and logistics, and manufacturing sectors to be based on domestic AI semiconductors. It plans to establish a vision analysis and inference computing clustering environment capable of 120 petaflops (PF, 1 trillion operations per second) through the enhancement of AI computing verification infrastructure.
Furthermore, the government will assist fabless corporations with the high costs associated with software required for AI semiconductor design and the expenses of design verification equipment, and will also help in the overseas verification processes of AI semiconductor products.