South Korea plans to invest 4,700 billion won in a national AI model

Seoul is splitting its sovereign model programme into two parts and launching a new competition open to start-ups. The budget, amounting to around 3.5 billion dollars, has yet to be approved.

The South Korean government will revamp its national foundation model program, dubbed Dokpamo, next year. The first part will be devoted to a frontier model, supported by 4.7 trillion won (about $3.49 billion) of public equity investment included in the 2027 budget proposal, which will have to be supplemented by private capital. A second part will help companies deploy Korean models, including smaller or specialized ones, in industry.

The Second Vice Minister of Science and ICT, Ryu Je-myung, justified the change in scale: the equivalent of about 1,000 high-end GPUs per team, the current endowment, does not allow for the catch-up of the cutting-edge models. Rather than automatically extending support for the two finalists in the current competition, which pits LG AI Research, SK Telecom and Upstage against each other, the ministry will launch a new competition open to other players, including start-ups.

Targeting Chinese open models

The minister acknowledges that confronting the American giants would be unrealistic, but believes that a model capable of competing with the best Chinese open models is within reach if the financing materializes. The investment structure, consortium or dedicated company, remains to be decided, and the envelope still needs to be approved by the National Assembly. At the same time, the ministry is preparing the distribution of some 29,000 GPUs purchased or in the process of being put into service by the state.