Startups Trillion Labs and Motif Technologies have submitted bids for the additional recruitment round of Korea's "Sovereign AI Foundation Model" project, which aims to develop a national champion in artificial intelligence. Naver Cloud and NC AI, which failed to advance in the initial round, did not participate in this supplementary call.
The Ministry of Science and ICT announced on the 12th, together with the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA), that two companies—Trillion Labs and Motif Technologies—have applied for the one remaining elite team slot. The ministry plans to complete document reviews and external expert evaluations promptly this month before announcing results.
The ministry had originally planned to select four teams in the first phase evaluation but eliminated Naver Cloud and NC AI. This led to an additional recruitment round to fill the remaining slot alongside the three teams that passed—LG AI Research, SK Telecom, and Upstage.
Motif Technologies is a subsidiary of AI infrastructure solutions company Moreh and has experience developing both high-performance large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) as foundation models. Trillion Labs gained industry attention by independently developing and open-sourcing a 70-billion parameter LLM within just one year of its founding. Both companies reportedly enhanced and refined their technologies before entering this supplementary round.
The government will evaluate the two applicants and add one to the elite team as early as this month. The newly selected company will receive 768 units of Nvidia's latest B200 GPUs, along with joint data procurement and training infrastructure support, together with the existing elite teams. The ministry will conduct interim reviews and second-phase evaluations in early August, with final selection of two companies through third-round evaluation in December.
However, if the AI models from the two applicants fail to meet required standards, additional selection may not occur. The ministry plans to carefully examine whether meaningful competition with the existing three teams is possible. A senior ministry official stated, "We reopened applications to give more companies opportunities, but we will not provide infrastructure to companies that clearly cannot qualify. Companies must demonstrate the capability to elevate domestic AI technology to global standards through their own technical prowess."