SEOUL, Feb 17 (Reuters) - South Korea on Monday

announced plans to secure 10,000 high-performance graphics

processing units (GPUs) within this year in a bid to keep pace

as the global AI race escalates.

"As competition for dominance in the AI industry

intensifies, the competitive landscape is shifting from battles

between companies to a full-scale rivalry between national

innovation ecosystems," South Korea's acting President Choi

Sang-mok said in a statement.

Choi said that the government aims to secure the 10,000 GPUs

through public-private cooperation to help the country launch

services at its national AI computing centre early.

Last month, the U.S. government announced a new regulation

aimed at regulating the flow of American AI chips and technology

needed for the most advanced AI applications.

The rule restricts the export of GPUs, specialized

processors originally created to accelerate graphics rendering.

The number of GPUs needed for an AI model depends on how

advanced the GPU is, how much data is being used to train the

model, the size of the model itself and the time the developer

wants to spend training it.

The regulation divides the world into tiers, with South

Korea among about 18 countries essentially exempt from the

restrictions, while 120 other countries will face caps and

countries like Iran, China and Russia barred completely.

The South Korean government has not yet decided what GPU

products to purchase, but details such as budget, GPU models and

participating private companies would be finalised by September

this year, an official from the Ministry of Science and ICT

(information and communications technology) told Reuters.

U.S. chip designer Nvidia ( NVDA ), which has seen soaring

demand from customers involved in generative AI and accelerated

computing for its chips, commands about an 80% share of the

global GPU market, far ahead of rivals Intel ( INTC ) and AMD

.

Meanwhile, Microsoft ( MSFT )-backed OpenAI is pushing ahead

with its plan to reduce its reliance on Nvidia ( NVDA ), Reuters reported

last week, for its chip supply by developing its first

generation of in-house AI silicon. OpenAI's popular chatbot

ChatGPT is trained and improved on tens of thousands of GPUs.

The ChatGPT maker is finalising the design for its first

in-house chip in the next few months and plans to send it for

fabrication at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co ( TSM ),

Reuters reported, citing sources.

The AI race has also been shaken up by the emergence of

Chinese startup DeepSeek, using AI models that optimise

computational efficiency rather than raw processing power,

potentially partly closing the gap between Chinese-made AI

processors and more powerful U.S. counterparts.