According to MotionBeat Monitoring, the Korean Economic Daily revealed that the South Korean Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning is in discussion with the Presidential Office and the Ministry of Strategy and Finance to utilize approximately 5 trillion KRW in excess tax revenue generated by the semiconductor industry. The plan is to conduct a large-scale purchase of around 10,000 of NVIDIA's latest Vera Rubin super chip GPU modules within the year to support a team of elite developers in building a world-class "Sovereign AI" model. This decision directly stems from the U.S.'s concerns over the export control of cutting-edge AI models. Following the restrictions on Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6, South Korean companies had to urgently modify systems built on these models. The concept of "nationalizing AI models" has thus become a reality. Currently, although South Korea has four teams—LG AI Research Institute, SK Telecom, Upstage, and Motif Technologies—working on independent foundational model projects, each team only has support for 700 to 800 GPUs. This dispersed investment makes it difficult to compete with the global cutting-edge models powered by tens of thousands of GPUs. Therefore, the government has decided to shift to a "select and focus" strategy, allocating the 10,000 GPUs to the top team at once and planning to include a special budget in the supplementary budget to bring in top AI talent from overseas.

Last month, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the slow pace of GPU procurement and requested that the relevant funds be ensured during the preparation of the supplementary budget. The global competitive window is extremely short, with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI iterating new models weekly. Through a single-focus strategy, France has surpassed Meta to become seventh globally with Mistral AI. If South Korea cannot catch up in the short term, it risks becoming an "AI satellite state." The South Korean semiconductor academic community has responded positively to this move, believing that investing the funds obtained from hardware prosperity into building software competitiveness is essentially an investment in the country's future.

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