[Alpha Biz= Paul Lee] South Korea has secured its first batch of more than 13,000 NVIDIA GPUs as part of a government-led procurement initiative developed in coordination with NVIDIA. The move marks the country’s entry into the intensifying global race to build large-scale AI infrastructure.

According to the Ministry of Science and ICT on December 1, the government recently imported approximately 13,000 GPUs—spanning multiple generations, including the latest B200 model—using funds from a KRW 1.46 trillion supplementary budget approved in May.

This shipment is the first follow-up action to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s visit to Korea in late October, during which he announced plans to supply more than 260,000 GPUs to Korea. Huang emphasized that Korea “has both strong software capabilities and a world-class manufacturing base,” outlining a phased supply plan that allocates up to 50,000 GPUs each to the government, Samsung, SK, and Hyundai Motor Group, and 60,000 to Naver Cloud.

Beginning early next year, the government will distribute its secured GPUs primarily to universities, research institutes, and startups, with a portion designated for public-sector use.

The GPUs will be operated through data center capacity provided by domestic cloud service providers. Once installed, researchers and companies will be able to access GPU resources as needed.

A Ministry official stated that the newly imported GPUs “will be put into service as soon as possible.”

 

 

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