[DigitalToday reporter Dae-geon Seok] AI chip specialist Mobilint entered the public AI infrastructure market after registering its AI solutions as innovation products with the Public Procurement Service for the first time. This marks the first time an NPU-based AI solution has been designated as a PPS innovation product. The registered items are MLX-A1 and MLA100, and both have been listed on the PPS Nara Market integrated shopping mall.

Central ministries, local governments and public institutions can now buy the two products through Nara Market. The designation also allows use of government support programmes for expanding public AI, such as pilot purchases and demonstration projects. The route for public institutions to adopt AI is widening, and a domestic option has been added to a public AI infrastructure market that has been centred on foreign GPUs.

At the core of the two products is Mobilint's in-house designed NPU, ARIES. The company said ARIES has received New Excellent Technology certification from the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and has been recognised for AI inference performance and power efficiency in edge environments. MLX-A1 and MLA100 were developed based on ARIES.

MLX-A1 is a standalone edge AI system that runs AI models on site without a server or cloud connection. It was designed for on-site environments such as AI education, smart manufacturing, public safety and video analytics. MLA100 is an ARIES-based PCIe card-type AI accelerator. It is designed to be installed in existing industrial systems or servers to add AI inference functions and can be applied to current environments without building separate infrastructure.

Mobilint plans to step up efforts to target demand in the public sector following the innovation product designation. A Mobilint official said, "We are increasing use cases across various industrial environments, including AI call centres, smart manufacturing, public safety, video analytics and monitoring systems, and we plan to support edge AI-based digital transformation by expanding demonstrations and adoption centred on public institutions in the future."