Korea's AI chip benchmark K-Perf heads to the grid in first field test

South Korea's science ministry said Friday that a homegrown benchmark for domestically designed AI chips will be used to screen hardware for a live power-grid pilot, the first time the metric has been applied to a real procurement decision rather than a laboratory test.

The Ministry of Science and ICT attended a signing ceremony at the headquarters of Rebelion, an AI chip designer, for a memorandum of understanding between the Korea Electric Power Corp., Rebelion and the Telecommunications Technology Association. Under the agreement, KEPCO will run the field pilot and develop usage models, Rebelion will optimize neural processing unit performance and provide technical support, and the TTA will verify performance and reliability under conditions that reflect how the equipment actually operates.

K-Perf was created to give buyers objective performance data on Korean AI chips and to raise confidence in them, and until now it has been tested mainly on generative AI services. Applying it to AI video analysis at power facilities extends its reach into a new area of verification, the ministry said.

KEPCO plans to replace AI video-analysis infrastructure that has been run separately at each substation with a single NPU-based control system, and then to test whether Korean chips can handle the workload in that live setting.

The benchmark was defined in December, when 15 buyer and supplier organizations agreed on measurement models, test conditions and detailed indicators. In June, the ministry, the TTA and the Institute of Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation tested two Korean AI chips across common generative AI tasks such as chatbots and document search, and confirmed they met the service-level objectives demanded by buyers.

"The fact that K-Perf verification results serve as the basis for a procurement decision means that a system in which buyers and suppliers discuss performance on a single standard has begun to work in the field," said Lee Do-kyu, director of the ministry's information and communications policy office. He added that KEPCO's use of the metric in its substation video-analysis pilot would be a strong reference for spreading it to other buyers.

Rebelion designs and develops NPUs specialized for AI inference, one of the country's leading fabless chip companies.