South Korea sovereign AI programme

Operating compute / delivered hardware. Reported operational or delivered: 7,656 NVIDIA B200 (physical hardware); 3,056 NVIDIA H200 (physical hardware). The stage is assigned from reported hardware status, disbursements and commitments.

The 2025 supplementary-budget procurement allocated 13,136 GPUs across NHN Cloud, Kakao and Naver Cloud, with 10,456 reserved for government use. NHN Cloud announced completion of its 7,656 B200 system in May 2026; Kakao reported 2,040 GPUs installed and testing in December 2025 within its 2,424-GPU allocation. ZDNet Korea reported Naver’s 3,056 H200 system in operation in May 2026. Korea’s longer-term targets combine public acquisitions with private-company plans. A separate National AI Computing Center is planned at Haenam.

Caveats on this record, 8

• MSIT’s July 2025 procurement announcement allocates 10,080 B200 and 3,056 H200 GPUs across three cloud providers. The KRW 1.46T supplementary-budget allocation was reported as approximately US$1.1B. The government-use quantities are subsets of the provider totals.
• NHN Cloud announced the completed 7,656-B200 system on 13 May 2026, with 6,120 GPUs reserved for government use. Some government-funded resources had been available since 1 April.
• Kakao’s 29 December 2025 announcement describes 2,040 installed B200 GPUs under final testing, within its 2,424-GPU allocation. It scheduled beta access for 2 January 2026 and gives no status for the remaining 384.
• Naver’s operational status follows ZDNet Korea’s 14 May 2026 report on its 3,056 H200 GPUs. Provider confirmation of that status is unavailable.
• Korea Herald reported in December 2025 a 52,000-GPU public-sector target for 2028 within a larger 260,000-GPU public/private plan for 2030. NVIDIA’s October 2025 announcement includes about 50,000 public-sector GPUs and more than 200,000 for private companies, without a completion date. These targets include multiple acquisition programmes.
• The sovereign-model programme selected five consortia in August 2025. At the January 2026 evaluation, LG AI Research, SK Telecom and Upstage advanced; Naver Cloud and NC AI were dropped, and a further selection round was planned to fill a fourth place.
• ZDNet Korea reported on 16 June 2026 that the Korea AI Computing Center company had registered the previous week, with its headquarters at Haenam. It reported Samsung SDS’s stake as 30%, the government’s as 29% and Naver Cloud’s as 26.1%. This corporate formation is separate from the 2025 cloud-provider GPU procurement.
• The AI Basic Act and its Enforcement Decree took effect on 22 January 2026.