South Korea bets $14B on AI as trillion-dollar race accelerates

According to the finance ministry of South Korea, it will set up a sovereign wealth fund worth more than 20 trillion won ($14 billion) on Friday to invest in strategic and advanced industries. It gives South Korea some new financial leverage at a time when various investments in AI infrastructure are on the verge of reaching 1 trillion dollars worldwide.

The timing is important. South Korea has both SK Hynix and Samsung, whose high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips power many of the world’s AI accelerators. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently mentioned a possible partnership with SK Group valued at about $500 billion during a meeting held in San Francisco with President Lee Jae Myung, according to an earlier report by Cryptopolitan.

Though the country excels in AI hardware production, it has relatively little AI computing capacity overall. The new fund aims to address that.

AI memory supplier with little compute of its own

South Korea is ahead in the production of memory chips used in AI. However, domestically it lags in AI computing infrastructure, which has led the government to invest directly in advancing this field.

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