SEOUL, Dec 5 (Reuters) – South Korea’s industry ministry and SoftBank’s chip unit, Arm Holdings, have signed an agreement to strengthen the country’s semiconductor and Artificial Intelligence sectors, a presidential policy adviser said on Friday.
The memorandum of understanding includes a plan for Arm to set up a chip design school in the country to tap its expertise in this area, Kim Yong-beom told reporters at a briefing.
The programme aims to train about 1,400 high-level chip design specialists, a move that Kim said would help bolster the relatively weak system-semiconductor and fabless segments in Asia’s fourth-biggest economy.
British chip and software company Arm licenses its chip designs and earns funds through royalties.
SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who met with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Friday, said that demand for chips will rise dramatically as AI advances, Kim quoted Son as saying.
The SoftBank CEO also noted that the energy sector was a weak point and South Korea did not have sufficient supply to support AI developments.
Son repeated on Friday that he believes AI is set to surpass human intelligence and that Artificial Superintelligence would be “10,000 times smarter than people.”
He said it was time to move beyond the notion that humans could control, teach or manage AI, and instead consider how to live with it harmoniously.
South Korea has ambitions to become one of the world’s top three AI powers and Lee has recently also held talks with other global technology leaders including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia boss Jensen Huang.
In October, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix signed letters of intent to supply memory chips for OpenAI’s data centres to help the ChatGPT developer with its Stargate project, a private initiative also backed by SoftBank and Oracle to build data centres.
Son is expected to meet SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won later on Friday to discuss cooperation in AI and semiconductors, the Donga Ilbo newspaper reported.
SK Group declined to comment.
Nvidia said in late October that it would supply more than 260,000 of its most advanced AI chips to South Korea’s government and some of the country’s biggest businesses, including Samsung Electronics.
(Reporting by Heekyong Yang, Hyunjoo Jin and Joyce Lee;Editing by Ed Davies)
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