[Digital Today reporter Seulgi Son] Bae Kyung-hoon (배경훈), deputy prime minister and minister of science and ICT, said he plans to request supply of Vera Rubin graphics processing units within this year in a meeting with Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang.

Bae met reporters on Sunday evening ahead of the 'Nvidia Korea AI Ecosystem Reception' at the Shilla Hotel in Seoul. "It looks like we will receive B300 on time, but Vera Rubin seems likely to be a bit delayed," he said. "We will ask to receive supply as a top priority (within this year)," he said.

On Sunday, the Ministry of Science and ICT announced the results of a 2.08 trillion won project to secure, build and support operation of GPUs. It selected Naver Cloud, Samsung SDS and Elice Group as operators. The project targets a phased launch of services for 7,688 B300 units within this year and 2,016 Vera Rubin units in the first half of 2027. Total secured supply is 9,704 units.

Bae also mentioned power infrastructure issues for building a gigawatt-class AI factory. "There is no problem with AI data centre power issues until 2030," he said. "If discussions emerge about gigawatt-class or above, we could create a dedicated power tariff plan and will actively cooperate with the Ministry of Climate and Energy," he said.

In the meeting, Bae and Huang agreed on the need to turn into concrete results the introduction of 260,000 GPUs agreed on the sidelines of last year's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings.

The two sides also discussed introducing an AI factory based on Vera Rubin NVL72 and steps to boost physical AI cooperation between Nvidia and domestic industry, academia and research institutions. An AI factory is specialised computing infrastructure that integrates GPUs and networks to manage the full cycle from data collection and training to inference.