South Korea Unveils $45 Billion AI Investment Plan Through 2030
South Korea committed $45 billion in public-private investment for AI development through 2030, with Samsung, SK, LG, and Hyundai pledging $34 billion alongside government spending.
Government and Private Sector Partner on National AI Strategy
South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT unveiled a comprehensive AI development plan on December 7, 2025, committing 62 trillion won ($45 billion) in combined public and private investment through 2030. The plan includes 15 trillion won in government spending on AI research infrastructure, data centers, and talent development, with Samsung, SK, LG, and Hyundai pledging the remaining 47 trillion won in corporate AI investment.
President Yoon Suk-yeol announced the strategy at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, calling AI "the determining technology for national competitiveness in the next decade." The plan aims to develop three globally competitive large language models, establish 12 specialized AI data centers, and train 100,000 AI engineers by 2030.
Key Pillars
The strategy rests on four pillars: sovereign AI computing infrastructure, world-class talent, industry-specific AI applications, and an ethical governance framework. The government will build a national AI computing center in Sejong City with 100,000 GPU-equivalent processing capacity, initially using NVIDIA H100 and domestically developed Sapeon AI chips.
Samsung Electronics committed to investing 28 trillion won in AI semiconductor development and on-device AI capabilities. SK Telecom announced plans for a 5 trillion won AI-native telecommunications network. Hyundai Motor Group pledged 8 trillion won for autonomous driving AI and robotics.
Talent Pipeline
The Ministry of Education will establish AI departments at all 10 national universities and provide full scholarships for 5,000 AI doctoral candidates annually. A new visa category for foreign AI researchers, modeled on Singapore's Tech.Pass program, will allow streamlined immigration for professionals from top global institutions.
Lee Jun-seok, director of the Korea AI Research Institute, said the talent shortage was the "single biggest constraint" on Korea's AI ambitions. "We have 35,000 AI professionals today. We need 135,000 by 2030 to be competitive with the U.S. and China," Lee said.
Regulatory Framework
The plan includes Korea's first comprehensive AI governance law, to be submitted to the National Assembly by March 2026. The legislation will establish mandatory risk assessments for high-risk AI applications in healthcare, criminal justice, and financial services, while maintaining a light-touch approach for general-purpose AI development.
Industry groups welcomed the plan's scale but raised concerns about regulatory uncertainty. The Federation of Korean Industries called for a "regulatory sandbox" period of at least two years before enforcement of AI governance requirements, arguing that premature regulation could handicap Korean companies competing against less-regulated Chinese rivals.
