Nvidia is working with the South Korean government to expand the nation’s AI infrastructure with over a quarter-million Nvidia GPUs across its sovereign clouds and AI factories.
Built with public- and private-sector deployments, the infrastructure forms the foundation for AI-enabled economic growth and innovation across Korea’s industries, including automotive, manufacturing and telecommunications.
South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) is accelerating its plans to deploy up to 50,000 of the latest Nvidia GPUs to accelerate sovereign AI development for enterprises and industries.
The AI infrastructure deployment will grow over the next several years from an initial deployment of 13,000 NVIDIA Blackwell and other GPUs by Nvidia Cloud Partner Naver Cloud, together with NHN Cloud and Kakao Corp., to expand computing infrastructure on the nation’s sovereign clouds through initiatives such as the establishment of Korea’s National AI Computing Center.
Research institutes, startups and AI companies will be able to use the sovereign infrastructure to build models and applications, supporting Korea’s national strategy to boost AI capabilities and infrastructure.
In addition, NVIDIA is working with industries, academia and research institutions in Korea on AI-RAN and 6G infrastructure. Nvidia is collaborating with Samsung, SK Telecom, ETRI, KT, LGU+ and Yonsei University to develop intelligent, low-power AI-RAN network technology that can reduce computing costs and extend device battery life by offloading GPU computation tasks to the network’s base station.
Naver Cloud is also expanding its Nvidia AI infrastructure and plans to deploy over 60,000 GPUs for sovereign and physical AI. Naver Cloud is preparing for the next stage of sovereign AI development in Korea, powered by Nvidia Nemotron open models running on its NVIDIA AI infrastructure. Naver Cloud plans to develop industry-specific AI models like shipbuilding and security, with a focus on inclusive AI for Korea’s citizens.
Teaming with Nvidia, Korea’s MSIT is advancing its Sovereign AI Foundation Models project to develop sovereign language models. The project will incorporate Nvidia NeMo and open Nvidia Nemotron datasets to tap local data for developing and distilling reasoning models.
LG AI Research, Naver Cloud, NC AI, SK Telecom and Upstage are participating in the project to support sovereign model development. Enterprises, researchers and startups will be able to contribute to and use the models to create AI agents with speech, reasoning and other capabilities.
LG is working with Nvidia to foster physical AI technology development and support the physical AI ecosystem.
Further, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) is working with Nvidia to establish a Center of Excellence designed to foster research collaboration using Korea’s sixth-generation national supercomputer, “Hangang,” which features Nvidia accelerated computing.
KISTI will also build foundation models for scientific research and development, and support researchers on developing physics-informed AI models using the open-source NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo framework.
