South Korea to expand private-led cloud industry in AI era

Seoul : South Korea will expand its private-led cloud computing industry to strengthen its competitiveness in the global artificial intelligence (AI) era, the science ministry said on Friday.

The Ministry of Science and ICT announced the vision to boost local cloud companies by forming strategic partnerships with global entities, aiming to double the domestic cloud market's size to 10 trillion won (US$7.3 billion) by 2027 from 2022.

South Korea's cloud technology is more than a year behind global leaders, and AI cloud infrastructure remains underdeveloped, according to the ministry, reports Yonhap news agency.

To better foster the industry, the government plans to devise measures to adopt private cloud systems across education, finance, defense and other public sectors, including easing network separation regulations and expanding tax benefits for AI and cloud companies.

It will also work to develop a homegrown AI chip to be used for data centres and establish a national AI computing centre with a capacity of more than 1 Exaflop, which means having a supercomputer that can calculate at least one quintillion floating point operations per second.

An AI innovation fund will also be created to support the transition to a private cloud ecosystem, with the government investing 45 billion won next year while inducing further investment from the private sector.

Meanwhile, the country also plans to open an AI safety research institute under the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute to support the "safe" development and application of AI technologies and global expansion of local AI companies, according to the ministry.

The envisioned launch of the institute comes as a follow-up measure to the global AI safety summit held in Seoul earlier this year, where leaders of major countries, including South Korea, Britain and the United States, adopted a joint declaration on promoting safe, innovative and inclusive AI.