JAKARTA - South Korean startup Lecturer Inc launched an artificial intelligence chip (AI) on Monday, February 13 to race to win a contract from the government as Seoul is now looking for a place for local companies in the exploding AI industry.
chip company ATOM is Korea's latest attempt to challenge global leader in the chip industry, Nvidia Corp, in hardware that powers potentially revolutionary AI technology.
AI is in the world of technology talks, as the ChatGPT - a chatbot from Microsoft-backed OpenAI capable of producing articles, essays, jokes, and even poetry, has become the fastest growing consumer app in history just two months after launch.
According to chip analyst Jefferies, Mark Lipakis, Nvidia, a US chip design company, has a big hand in high-end AI chips, which generates about 86% of the world's six largest cloud services as of December.
The South Korean government wants to grow its domestic industry, investing more than 800 million US dollars (Rp 12.1 trillion) over the next five years for research and development in an effort to lift Korea's AI chip market share in the domestic data center from zero to 80% by 2030.
"It's hard to catch up with Nvidia, which is well ahead in AI chips for general purposes," said Kim Yang-Paeng, a senior researcher at Korea's Institute of Economics and Industry, quoted by Reuters. "But that's not set because AI chips can perform different functions and no restrictions or metrics are set."
According to the founder and chief executive of Lecturerlions Park Sunghyun, ATOM Mikhallons is designed to excel in carrying out computer vision and chatbot AI apps. Since it targets certain tasks rather than doing various things, the chip only consumes about 20% of the power of the Nvidia A100 chip on those tasks.
The A100 is the most popular chip for AI workloads, powerful enough to make or "train" AI models. ATOM, designed by Berjullons and manufactured by Korean giant Samsung Electronics Co, was unable to conduct training.
While countries such as Taiwan, China, France, Germany and the United States have extensive plans to support their semiconductor companies, the South Korean government rarely selects AI chips for concentrated boosts.
Seoul will issue a notification this month for two data centers, called neural processing unit farms, with only domestic chipmakers allowed to bid, an official at the Ministry of Science and ICT told Reuters.
In a country whose company supplies half of the world's memory chips, authorities want to create a market that can be a test ground for AI chipmakers, aiming to encourage global competition.
"The government twisted the data center's arms and told them, 'Hey, use this chip'," Park, Morgan Stanley's former engineer, told Reuters.
Without such support, he said, their data centers and customers will most likely stick to the Nvidia chip.
Sapeon Korea Inc also plans to participate in the project, according to its subsidiary SK Telecom Co.
FuriosaAI, backed by South Korea's top search engines, the Naver Corp and the state-run Korea Development Bank, told Reuters it would also bid.
"There is a lot of momentum behind Nvidia's development. This startup has to build momentum, so it will take time," said Alan Priestley, an analyst at IT research firm Gartner. "But government incentives like what happened in Korea could affect market share in Korea."
The Mclions will seek to participate in government projects in a consortium with KT Corp, telecommunications operator, cloud, and large Korea data center, in hopes of stopping Nvidia customers from US suppliers.
"Amid a high dependence on foreign GPUs (graphics processing units) globally, cooperation between KT and Lecturellions will allow us to have a 'AI full stack' that includes software and hardware based on domestic technology," said KT Vice President Bae Han-chul.
Lichellions declined to provide estimates for its AI chip business. It has raised 122 billion won (IDR 1.4 trillion), including 30 billion won from KT in a funding round followed by Temasek Pavilion Capital Singapore and a 10 billion won grant from the South Korean government.
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