South Korea is to add a new artificial intelligence (AI) chip to its arsenal of semiconductors as the nation seeks a bigger slice of the global technology market and an upgrade of its industrial capabilities.
The Sapeon X220, unveiled yesterday by the country’s largest carrier SK Telecom Co, is designed to speed up servers that cater to a growing number of mobile devices — from drones to self-driving vehicles — that perform better with AI.
It is the latest product of the nation’s decade-long push to broaden its dominance beyond memory chips, where Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc control about two-thirds of the global market.
Photo: Bloomberg
Seoul sees data-processing chips as a major engine for economic growth, along with 5G wireless networks.
The government has provided more than 600 billion won (US$542. million) in support to develop the chips and plans to invest another 1 trillion won over the next decade, viewing them as crucial in automating factories and improving the competitiveness of the country’s exports.
“As we teamed up with the government, we said: ‘Let’s make AI available and affordable for all of our companies,’” SK Telecom vice president Lee Jong-min said. “South Korea has the demand, the full stack of tech needed to meet the demand, and the ability to take it to the next level.”
Semiconductors account for about one-fifth of South Korea’s exports, most of them memory chips.
The country is now turning to application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), such as the X220, which is tailored for AI operations.
It follows a similar US$1 billion investment plan announced by the US government earlier this year, which also emphasized AI and public-private collaboration.
As the first country in the world to roll out commercial 5G last year, South Korea believes that it can also lead in adopting and optimizing AI, aided by the nation’s compact size, wide broadband coverage and smartphone penetration.
However, competition is heating up in the AI semiconductor sector, with the likes of Amazon.com Inc and Google holding company Alphabet Inc investing in their own bespoke server silicon.
As more devices than ever come online, companies are betting that they can unlock value and insights from the resulting trove of data through machine learning and analysis at scale.
Like SK Telecom, US competitors offer cloud services to other companies, and the investment in designing the chips makes sense when factoring in the cost of electricity and the chips’ ability to handle greater volumes of data more efficiently.
SK Telecom’s chip, at the size of a postage stamp, is the first South Korean ASIC for data centers to be commercialized, the company said.
It represents the latest push by the Seoul-based carrier to expand beyond its traditional mobile and broadband businesses, and keep up in an era of AI-driven innovation.
The global AI chip market is led by Nvidia Corp, a graphics-card giant whose market value has eclipsed that of Intel Corp.
Even smartphone processors from the likes of Apple Inc and Huawei Technologies Co (華為) now come with dedicated cores for handling AI tasks, and the need for more ASICs is forecast to rise as AI gains more ground in global technology.
RUN IT BACK: A succesful first project working with hyperscalers to design chips encouraged MediaTek to start a second project, aiming to hit stride in 2028 MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it is engaging a second hyperscaler to help design artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators used in data centers following a similar project expected to generate revenue streams soon. The first AI accelerator project is to bring in US$1 billion revenue next year and several billion US dollars more in 2027, MediaTek chief executive officer Rick Tsai (蔡力行) told a virtual investor conference yesterday. The second AI accelerator project is expected to contribute to revenue beginning in 2028, Tsai said. MediaTek yesterday raised its revenue forecast for the global AI accelerator used
TEMPORARY TRUCE: China has made concessions to ease rare earth trade controls, among others, while Washington holds fire on a 100% tariff on all Chinese goods China is effectively suspending implementation of additional export controls on rare earth metals and terminating investigations targeting US companies in the semiconductor supply chain, the White House announced. The White House on Saturday issued a fact sheet outlining some details of the trade pact agreed to earlier in the week by US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that aimed to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Under the deal, China is to issue general licenses valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite “for the benefit of US end users and their suppliers
Dutch chipmaker Nexperia BV’s China unit yesterday said that it had established sufficient inventories of finished goods and works-in-progress, and that its supply chain remained secure and stable after its parent halted wafer supplies. The Dutch company suspended supplies of wafers to its Chinese assembly plant a week ago, calling it “a direct consequence of the local management’s recent failure to comply with the agreed contractual payment terms,” Reuters reported on Friday last week. Its China unit called Nexperia’s suspension “unilateral” and “extremely irresponsible,” adding that the Dutch parent’s claim about contractual payment was “misleading and highly deceptive,” according to a statement
Artificial intelligence (AI) giant Nvidia Corp’s most advanced chips would be reserved for US companies and kept out of China and other countries, US President Donald Trump said. During an interview that aired on Sunday on CBS’ 60 Minutes program and in comments to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump said only US customers should have access to the top-end Blackwell chips offered by Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company by market capitalization. “The most advanced, we will not let anybody have them other than the United States,” he told CBS, echoing remarks made earlier to reporters as he returned to Washington
RSS