The government has brought in part of the initial batch to Korea under the graphics processing unit (GPU) supply plan discussed with Nvidia.
According to the Ministry of Science and ICT on the 1st, the government recently received about 13,000 GPUs from Nvidia and brought them into the country. The funds were reportedly executed through 1.46 trillion won allocated in May under the supplementary budget.
The imported GPUs are known to be a mix of Nvidia's latest B200 and previous-generation products. Instead of large corporations with their own procurement capacity, the government plans to prioritize allocations starting early next year to universities, research institutes, and Start - Up companies, and also deploy them in the public sector. For data center infrastructure to run the GPUs, it will use floor space owned by domestic cloud providers, with the government installing GPUs at those centers and operating a structure in which researchers and companies use services as needed.
This batch also aligns with Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang's plan for building a "Korea AI infrastructure," released during his late-October visit to Korea. At the time, Nvidia said it would sequentially supply a total of about 260,000 GPUs to Korea, proposing to provide 50,000 to the government, up to 50,000 each to Samsung, SK, and Hyundai Motor Group, and 60,000 to Naver Cloud.
The government plans to introduce the remaining units in phases in line with next year's budget execution and begin full-scale provision to industry, academia, and research.