South Korean firms sign MOU to develop sovereign AI stack using domestic NPU and LLM
Five South Korean tech companies have signed an agreement to build a full-stack sovereign AI infrastructure, aiming to reduce reliance on foreign GPUs.
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South Korean cloud infrastructure provider Orchestro Cloud announced on October 19 that it signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with four other local technology firms on October 16 to jointly develop a "sovereign AI full-stack appliance" based on neural processing units (NPUs).
According to ZDNet Korea, the partnership includes FuriosaAI, which will supply its domestic NPU "RNGD," and Upstage, providing its proprietary large language model "Solar." The project aims to integrate AI computing, cloud infrastructure, model inference, and operations management into a single environment.
The stated goal is to lower dependency on overseas graphics processing units (GPUs) and cloud technologies for public and private sectors in South Korea. The five companies plan to proceed with joint development, proof-of-concept (PoC) testing, and eventual commercialization, though no specific timeline or performance benchmarks were disclosed in the announcement.