Gov’t to spend $1 bn on GPU procurement for AI cloud service launch

(Ministry of Science and ICT)

The South Korean government will secure 10,000 high-performance graphic processing units (GPUs) within 2025 and begin offering artificial intelligence (AI) cloud services to domestic industry, academic, and research institutions as early as October.

The government plans to place purchase orders starting in July for Nvidia Corp.’s latest GPU models - the H200 and Blackwell - at a roughly 6:4 ratio.

The Ministry of Science and ICT announced its initiative titled, “Plan for Securing Advanced GPUs” during the Economic Ministers’ Meeting and the Ministerial Meeting on Industrial Competitiveness on Wednesday.

The government earlier allocated a supplementary budget of 1.46 trillion won ($1.04 billion) to meet domestic AI computing demand.

As the lead agency, the Ministry of Science and ICT plans to select a cloud service provider by June 2026 viaan open call this month.

The selected CSP will be responsible for rapidly securing, building, and operating large-scale, high-performance GPUs using government funds.

The CSP that intends to participate in the National AI Computing Center project will also manage the operation of the GPUs.

The National AI Computing Center is scheduled to launch in 2027, with a consortium bid for the special purpose company managing the project open until the end of May 2025.

The ministry plans to install the GPUs secured i 2025 sequentially in the selected CSP’s existing data centers and begin offering GPU-as-a-Service by as early as October.

Once the National AI Computing Center is formed, these GPUs will be transferred to the center and prioritized for use by domestic academia, industry, and research institutions engaged in government-led development of large language models (LLMs) and related AI research.

A recent GPU demand survey conducted by the ministry in April 2025 that targeted 405 organizations - excluding large corporations - showed that 45.9 percent identified their need for GPU resources as “extremely urgent,” requiring access within six months.

Overall, 79.2 percent of respondents indicated they would need GPU resources within a year.

In the meantime, tbe ministry also plans to select up to five top-tier companies by July 2025 to develop a national AI model. These companies will receive prioritized government support, including access to GPUs, data, and talent, to develop AI models that can compete at a global level.