South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT announced last Sunday local time that it has finally selected the consortium led by Samsung SDS as the operator of South Korea’s National AI Computing Center Project, and signed core agreements covering project implementation and the establishment of a Special Purpose Company (SPC).
The consortium includes Naver Cloud, Samsung C&T, Kakao, Samsung Electronics, KT Corporation, Clush, along with Jeollanam-do Provincial Government and the South West Coast Enterprise City Development Agency.
When the project tender was announced last September, only the Samsung SDS consortium submitted a bid proposal. The consortium was named the preferred negotiation partner in March this year. Following due diligence and multiple rounds of negotiations, the final cooperation agreement has been finalized.
The Ministry of Science and ICT stated that after obtaining investment approval for the SPC from the National Growth Fund, the consortium has secured initial capital of 400 billion South Korean won, including 116 billion won in government public funds and 284 billion won in private capital investment.
After the official signing, the Ministry and the consortium plan to establish a public-private joint venture SPC in the second quarter of this year, and kick off construction of the AI Computing Center in the third quarter. The SPC will conduct additional financing later to support the project’s total investment of 2.5 trillion won. The consortium aims to build a high-performance AI computing infrastructure equipped with 15,000 advanced AI chips by 2028.
Upon completion, the computing center will provide globally competitive AI computing resources at affordable costs to domestic startups, small and medium-sized enterprises, and research institutions across South Korea. A dedicated R&D zone will also be built within the campus to support trial operation and reliability verification for commercial-ready Neural Processing Units (NPU), further improving South Korea’s domestic AI semiconductor industrial ecosystem.
Bae Kyung-hoon, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT, stated that the South Korean government will fully support the country’s development into an innovation hub where all participants can freely engage in AI innovation, and build Asia’s premier AI infrastructure center.
(Reprinted from https://news.eccn.com/）