An October announcement that Nvidia would supply 260,000 GPUs to South Korea was seen as a diplomatic gain, but most supply is concentrated among large companies. About 20 percent is available for academia, research institutes and startups, with the government leasing capacity from cloud firms. The author argues AI demand is shifting toward low-latency inference, where domestic NPUs could be deployed, but cheap large-scale GPU supply could crowd them out. He calls for regional distributed inference hubs using idle public assets and local demand aggregation.

The Korea Artificial Intelligence Association marked its 10th anniversary and set a goal of shifting into a private-sector leadership platform that presents technology direction in the AI era and the global order. At an event held on May 7 at AI Expo Korea, it shared a plan to lead expansion beyond large language models and generative AI into agent AI, world models and physical AI. It also outlined four governance initiatives to realize the vision.