South Korea Plans to Invest 50 Trillion Won in Semiconductor Tax Revenue to Develop 'Sovereign AI'

According to monitoring by Dongcha Beating, the Korea Economic Daily has reported that the Ministry of Science and ICT of South Korea is in discussions with the presidential office and the finance department to utilize approximately 50 trillion won in excess tax revenue from the semiconductor industry. The plan includes a large-scale procurement of around 10,000 of Nvidia's most advanced Vera Rubin superchip GPU modules within the year, aimed at supporting elite teams in developing world-class 'sovereign AI' models. This decision stems directly from the sense of crisis regarding U.S. export controls on cutting-edge AI models—such as Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6—which have been restricted from external access, forcing South Korean companies to urgently revise systems built on these models. The concept of 'national strategic assetization' of AI models has thus become a reality. Currently, South Korea has four teams, including LG AI Research Institute, SK Telecom, Upstage, and Motif Technologies, advancing independent foundational model projects, but each team has only received support for 700 to 800 GPUs, making it difficult to compete with global leading models that utilize tens of thousands of GPUs. As a result, the government has decided to adopt a 'selection and concentration' strategy, allocating 10,000 GPUs to the top teams in one go and planning to include special funding for attracting top overseas AI talent in the supplementary budget. Last month, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung publicly stated that the procurement speed of GPUs is too slow and demanded that relevant funding be ensured in the supplementary budget preparation. The current global competition window is extremely short, with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI iterating new models weekly. France, with its singular focus strategy, has surpassed Meta to become the seventh globally with Mistral AI. If South Korea cannot catch up in the short term, it risks becoming an 'AI subsidiary nation.' The South Korean semiconductor academic community has responded positively, believing that investing the funds gained from hardware prosperity into software competitiveness is essentially an investment in the country's future.