SOUTH KOREA PLANS To Buy 10,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs Next Year

South Korea plans to spend about 4 trillion won next year to buy 10,000 of Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin GPUs to support public services such as universal AI and build national AI infrastructure. According to Odaily, the Ministry of Science and ICT plans to extend the AI computing resource utilization project and equip all GPUs introduced next year with Vera Rubin chips. Under the project, private companies including cloud providers that operate data centers handle GPU purchases, construction, and service operations, with funding coming from the government budget. The government said it has obtained more than 30,000 GPUs over the past two years through the project and other measures and has supplied them to public and private sectors. Vera Rubin's training performance is up to six times higher than the previous Blackwell architecture, while inference performance is more than eight times higher. A ministry official said the GPU procurement plan and budget size have not been finalized. Industry sources said data center space is limited, making it difficult to secure large amounts of new resources next year, and the government is reviewing alternative options.