On Monday, February 17, South Korea announced its plans to secure 10,000 high-performance graphics processing units in a bid to keep pace as the global artificial intelligence race escalates.
South Korea’s acting President Choi Sang-mok stated that as competition for dominance in the machine intelligence industry intensifies, the competitive landscape is shifting from battles between companies to full-scale rivalry between national innovation ecosystems. It was also noted that the government aims to secure 10,000 graphics processing units through cooperation between the public and private sectors to help the country launch services at its national artificial intelligence computing center early.
It’s worth mentioning that last month, the United States government announced a new regulation aimed at controlling the flow of US artificial intelligence chips and technologies needed for the most advanced AI apps. This rule restricts the export of graphics processing units, specialized processors originally developed to accelerate graphics rendering.
The number of graphics processing units required for a particular AI model depends on how advanced the GPU is, how much data is being used to train the model, the size of the model itself, and the time the developer plans to spend to train it.
The South Korean government has not yet decided which graphics processing units to purchase. An unnamed official from the country’s Ministry of Science and ICT (information and communications technology), while talking to media representatives, said that details such as the budget, the mentioned processors models, and the participation of private companies would be finalized by September of the current year.
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