Korea Commits $919B to 18.4GW AI Datacenter Buildout by 2035
TL;DR
- SK Telecom runs an independent 15GW datacenter plan separate from the coordinated government program, putting SK Group's total exposure above the headline chaebol figure.
- Nvidia has already deployed 260,000-plus Blackwell GPUs across Korean sovereign clouds and industrial partners, embedding supply before the megaproject's formal GPU procurement opens.
- Opposition lawmakers allege the Honam chip hub site rewarded an 85%-Lee-voting region over commercial logic, threatening permitting legitimacy for the 2029 phase-one target.
South Korea has committed to a $919B datacenter buildout targeting 8.4 gigawatts of capacity by 2029 and 18.4 gigawatts by 2035, per a SemiAnalysis breakdown of the country's sovereign AI program. The first phase splits 5GW to SK Group, 2.4GW to GS Group, and 1GW to Naver.
Alongside the physical buildout, Seoul is running a foundation-model tournament to pick a national champion. SemiAnalysis lists the surviving cohort as "Upstage, LG AI Research, SK Telecom, NC AI, and Naver," and the government later ran a supplemental round to add a fourth entrant: Motif Technologies, "a neolab that spun out of Moreh." Motif is tiny by any standard. "Motif was a sub 30 person startup that released their first pre-trained model, which was only 2.6B total parameters, last June," the report says, adding that the team has "raised just $17M and have access to a mere 768 B200s." Even so, per the report, "Motif 3 is 10 points ahead of Upstage and by far the best Korean model."
The upside on the supply side looks distinctly American. Samsung "reportedly plans to build an Nvidia-powered AI factory using more than 50,000 GPUs," and SK Telecom's "announced 2GW DSX AI factory is expected to deploy Vera Rubin systems powered by SK Hynix HBM4." The gigawatt ambition sits oddly next to the state-level US datacenter pushback we've been logging this week, where governors are curbing individual sites at a fraction of Korea's scale. Pennsylvania signed an order curbing 'predatory' data centers yesterday. Against the datacenter number, meanwhile, the government's model-training pot is small: "the total government budget of ~$350M is still a rounding error compared to US labs."
Jensen Huang, quoted in the piece, argues that "Open weight models—AI models that anyone can download, inspect, modify, and run on their own infrastructure—are an important part of that foundation," a framing that fits Korea's insistence on locally-built open models even while it imports American silicon to run them.
What others are reporting
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Al Jazeera Read →
Leads on opposition allegations that the Honam chip hub was chosen for electoral rather than commercial reasons, introducing permitting risk for the 2029 phase one.
"We must secure the core elements of AI faster than any other country," the president said in a televised address.
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Light Reading Read →
Frames AIDCs as intelligence factories and details the parallel domestic NPU push via FuriosaAI and Rebellions, plus plans to export turnkey AIDC architectures globally.
"In the AI era, data centers are factories that produce intelligence." -- SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won.
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CloudTech News Read →
Reveals SK Telecom's independent 15GW rollout is separate from the 8.4GW coordinated program, with a cost benchmark of roughly 70 trillion KRW per gigawatt.
"This AI data centre project is aimed at preemptively preparing the computing infrastructure that the global AI ecosystem needs." -- SKT CEO Jung Jai-hun.
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Nvidia / GlobeNewswire Read →
First-party Nvidia press release confirms 260,000-plus GPUs already deployed across Korean sovereign clouds and Samsung, SK Group, and Hyundai, ahead of formal megaproject procurement.
"Korea's leadership in technology and manufacturing positions it at the heart of the AI industrial revolution." -- Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO.
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Telecompaper Read →
Documents that President Lee presented the plan alongside Samsung and SK Group executives at Cheong Wa Dae, confirming head-of-state-level political commitment to the timetable.
Semiconductors, AI data centres and physical AI as the three pillars of the country's next phase of development.
Originally reported by newsletter.semianalysis.com
Read the original article →Original headline: SemiAnalysis Details South Korea's $919B Sovereign AI Push, 18.4GW Datacenter Target by 2035