South Korea’s moves to dominate AI chips
South Korea wants to compete with US Nvidia on artificial intelligence (AI) chips. All plans of the Seoul government
Compete with the world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) chips Nvidia? The Seoul government believes in it, at least for the domestic market, and is preparing to give copious public funds to some startups, one of which has developed an alternative chip to that of the American company capable of extremely high performance.
Seoul's plan on chips
It will not be easy to compete with Nvidia, holder of the A100 patent, the most advanced AI chip in the world which, according to Jefferies analyst Mark Lipacis, has allowed the US company to conquer 86% of the computing power of the four largest cloud services on the planet.
But, as an exclusive Reuters revelation has highlighted, South Korea is intent on pursuing this battle to fuel the birth of a domestic AI industry, and is set to allocate more than $800 million to research and the development in an effort to raise the market share of Korean AI chips used in domestic data centers from the current zero to 80% by 2030.
“It will be difficult to catch up with Nvidia,” Kim Yang-Paeng, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, told Reuters, “because it is so far ahead (in design) of chips for AI. But this is not a destiny set in stone, as AI chips can support different functions and there are no fixed boundaries or metrics”.
Seoul therefore proposes to move in the wake of the USA, Taiwan, China, France and Germany, all nations with plans to support their respective semiconductor industries, preparing to launch a tender next month for the construction of two data centres, defined as neural processing unit farms , in which only national industries can participate.
“The government,” Park Sunghyun, co-founder and CEO of a startup called Rebellions that will play a leading role in Seoul's plans, told Reuters, “is forcing data centers' hand by telling them, 'hey, use these chips! ”. Park believes that without the executive's financial backing, data centers and their customers would likely stick with Nvidia's chips.
Rebellions, Rising AI Champion?
The first candidate to benefit from South Korean public funds is Rebellions, which just Monday launched a new AI chip called ATOM.
As CEO Park Sunghyun explained to Reuters , the ATOM chip was designed to excel in computer vision and innovative chatbot applications.
ATOM differs from other AI chips in that it performs specific tasks rather than a broad range of functions, which allows it to consume just 20% of the power required by Nvidia's A100 chip.
Rebellions will participate in the tender in a consortium with KT, one of South Korea's largest telecoms that operates a powerful data center.
As KT vice president Bae Han-chul told Reuters , “the cooperation between KT and Rebellions will allow us to have a complete AI package including software and hardware based on domestic technology and this in an environment dominated globally by GPUs (graphics foreign processing units).
Other candidates
But there are other indigenous companies that are considering participating in the government tender.
One of these is Sapeon Korea, which will take part together with its subsidiary SK Telecom; another ready to take the field is FuriosaAI, which will be supported by the country's main search engine Naver and the state-owned bank Korea Development Bank.
“These startups,” says Alan Priestley, an analyst at IT research firm Gartner, “have yet to build momentum, so it will take some time. But with the incentives that the government is about to make available, it could very well affect the market share (for AI chips) in South Korea."
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/corea-del-sud-chip-intelligenza-artificiale/ on Wed, 15 Feb 2023 06:16:40 +0000.