The South Korean government is rallying a broad ecosystem to maximize the competitiveness of domestically developed artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductors. It plans to build AI-powered smart cities to create large-scale demand for neural processing units (NPUs), aiming to reduce reliance on graphics processing units (GPUs) dominated by U.S. chipmaker Nvidia and accelerate the growth of Korean AI chip companies.
The Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) has decided to restructure the existing "K-Cloud Alliance" into the "K-NPU Alliance," expanding its scope to center on NPUs, according to IT industry sources on Wednesday. The National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA), an agency under MSIT, is preparing detailed support measures to broaden the AI semiconductor ecosystem, including the alliance overhaul.
The K-Cloud Alliance currently comprises 153 member companies spanning AI chipmakers, cloud service providers, and AI model and service firms. The governance restructuring is seen as focused on more actively generating domestic demand for NPUs, analysts said. NPUs, which consume less power than GPUs, are drawing growing attention as an alternative as the AI industry shifts from the training phase to the inference phase. The application scope of AI semiconductors is also expected to expand well beyond data centers and cloud computing into on-device AI, smart cities, and virtually every industrial sector.
