Bet on the New Wave! South Korea aims to become the third largest AI power in the world

Author: Chang Jiashuai

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI tool

The birth of ChatGPT has made governments and enterprises of various countries see the prospect of the fourth industrial revolution. The world's major economies have invested heavily in the game, striving to seize the opportunity in the AI competition. South Korea, which already has a foothold in the semiconductor field, is also trying to join the ranks of AI powerhouses.

According to the national digital strategy released by the South Korean government recently, South Korea’s goal is to become one of the world’s three major AI powers by 2027, following the United States and China.

Industry watchers believe South Korea's dominance in the memory chip market and strong AI ecosystem give it an edge in the global AI chip race.

Developing and running a large language model similar to the OpenAI GPT series requires not only high-performance GPUs such as Nvidia A100, but also high-performance memory chips. South Korea is a global leader in memory chips.

South Korean companies Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are two of the world's largest memory chipmakers and have been investing aggressively in AI research and development.

In the fourth quarter of 2022, Samsung captured 40.7 percent of the memory chip market, SK Hynix 28.8 percent and Micron came in third with 26.4 percent, according to research firm TrendForce.

Samsung said in March that it planned to invest 300 trillion won (1.67 trillion yuan) to build a new semiconductor facility in South Korea.

South Korean Minister of Science Lee Jong-ho told US media CNBC:

"In order to use artificial intelligence, including very large language models, a large number of semiconductor chips are required to operate, and global companies are competing fiercely to create high-performance and low-power AI semiconductors optimized for AI computing."

Some analysts pointed out that the United States, such as Intel and Nvidia, have spoiled the design of chips and have almost never set foot in the field of memory chips. Therefore, South Korea has a unique advantage in the future AI competition.

At the same time, the South Korean government is also actively investing in the AI industry chain.

In 2022, South Korea's Ministry of Science said it will deploy 1.02 trillion won (5.45 billion yuan) in funding for artificial intelligence semiconductor research and development over the next five years.

Minister Li Zonghao said:

"AI is not only driving the development of digital industries such as cloud computing and metadata, but is also a key factor in substantially improving the productivity of traditional industries such as manufacturing and logistics."

“We will spare no effort to help Korea secure world-class AI semiconductor technology, leverage our memory semiconductor capabilities, advance AI semiconductors in phases by 2030, develop additional application data centers, and train AI semiconductor experts. "

In South Korea, there are also some powerful companies that have launched their own large-scale models.

Wall Street has previously introduced that South Korea’s local search engine giant Naver plans to export large models to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. Naver, the company’s AI business director, said that the gap between Naver’s large models and ChatGPT is about 8 months, and the export price is lower than that of the United States. Tech companies are much lower and have better quality in terms of localized services.