Science ministry hosts AMD's Su in Seoul as Korean AI chip firms seek global partners

The science ministry hosted AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su in Seoul on Wednesday, bringing her together with 13 Korean AI chip and infrastructure companies to discuss cooperation and overseas market opportunities, as a follow-up to a memorandum of understanding signed in July.

Second Vice Minister Ryu Je-myung met Su at the Four Seasons Hotel Seoul to review progress on the ministry's cooperation projects with AMD, including the establishment of an AMD AI Center of Excellence in Korea within the year and graduate-level training in artificial intelligence and AI transformation. The two sides agreed to push those projects forward without delay.

Attention focused on building heterogeneous computing infrastructure that combines AMD's central processing units and graphics processing units with Korean AI semiconductors, which could serve as a reference model for global markets. Ryu said the center of gravity in global AI infrastructure competition is shifting from individual chip products to systems and platforms as the AI inference market expands.

The roundtable, billed as the Korea AI Semiconductor & Startup Roundtable, was arranged so that domestic companies could meet AMD's top management directly. Participants included AI chip developers FuriosaAI, HyperAccel, DEEPX, Mobilint and MangoBoost, software and cloud firms Moreh, Nota AI and Lablup, memory and storage companies Fadu and Panesia, network specialist Dnotitia, and AI model developer Upstage.

Executives discussed linking AMD's CPUs and GPUs with Korean AI chips, joining open software ecosystems such as ROCm, and ways for Korean AI chip companies to enter global markets. They presented how their technologies and services could connect to AMD's global AI ecosystem and shared ideas on technical cooperation and overseas expansion.

Su described Korea as an important partner for AMD and said the company would work with strong Korean firms to create new cooperation opportunities as Korea builds its AI competitiveness. She said AMD, which has expanded links between technologies and companies through its open ecosystem, would actively support Korean companies in connecting to the global AI ecosystem.

The ministry said it will review the cooperation proposals and requests raised at the meeting and develop them into concrete projects tied to the follow-up measures of its memorandum with AMD.

"The cooperation with AMD that began with July's memorandum took a step further through Chairman Su's visit, leading to direct meetings with our companies," Ryu said. "The most important role the government can play is to create a place where good companies and technologies can meet, and to support those meetings in leading to actual cooperation."

Ryu said he expected the meeting to combine AMD's global capabilities with Korean companies' technology to produce new AI technologies and businesses, and to serve as a chance for the domestic AI semiconductor ecosystem to grow further.