South Korean government plans to invest approximately 4 trillion won to procure 10,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs

Odaily Planet Daily News: The South Korean government plans to invest approximately 4 trillion won next year to procure 10,000 of NVIDIA's latest Vera Rubin GPUs, aiming to support the expansion of public-facing services such as "AI for All" and the construction of a national-level AI infrastructure. 

The Ministry of Science and ICT plans to extend the "Project for Strengthening the Foundation for Utilizing AI Computing Resources" and configure all GPUs introduced next year as Vera Rubin. This project entrusts private companies, such as cloud service providers operating data centers, with the entire process of GPU procurement, construction, and service provision, funded by the government budget. 

Over the past two years, through this project and other means, the South Korean government has secured over 30,000 GPUs, providing them to both the public and private sectors. Compared to the previous generation Blackwell architecture, the Vera Rubin offers up to a 6-fold improvement in training performance and over an 8-fold improvement in inference performance. A source from the Ministry of Science and ICT stated that the specific GPU procurement plan and budget size have not yet been finalized. Industry insiders mentioned that current data center space is insufficient, making it challenging to secure large-scale new resources by next year. The government is currently evaluating various alternative plans.