Artificial Intelligence in South Korea

Artificial intelligence in South Korea refers to the development, regulation and industrial strategy of AI in one of Asia's most technologically advanced economies. South Korea pairs the world's dominant position in high-bandwidth memory chips with an aggressive national build-out of AI data centres and compute, and it became the first country in Asia to put a comprehensive AI law into force when its AI Basic Act took effect in January 2026.^[1][2]

Background

South Korea's AI ambitions build on decades as a semiconductor and consumer-electronics power. Samsung Electronics and SK hynix together supply most of the world's high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the component that lets AI accelerators feed data to processors fast enough for training and inference.^[3] The government of President Lee Jae-myung has put AI at the centre of economic policy: his 2026 budget more than tripled national AI investment, described in his budget speech as the first national budget for the AI era.^[4]

The AI Basic Act

The AI Basic Act — formally the Act on the Development of Artificial Intelligence and Establishment of Trust — was enacted in January 2025 and took effect on 22 January 2026, joining the European Union AI Act as one of the world's first comprehensive AI regulatory regimes.^[1][5] It sets transparency duties for generative AI, including advance notice to users and labelling of AI-generated outputs, and imposes planning, explainability and human-oversight obligations on high-impact AI in areas such as healthcare, energy, transport, hiring and biometric analysis. Systems trained above a defined compute threshold of 10^26 floating-point operations face additional safety obligations, the law applies extraterritorially with domestic-agent requirements for large foreign providers, and administrative fines of up to 30 million won apply — after a one-year grace period designed to let companies prepare. New institutions include a presidentially chaired National AI Committee and an AI Safety Research Institute.^[1]

Industry and Infrastructure

South Korea's industrial policy for AI is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars. In June 2026, President Lee announced a chip and AI investment drive exceeding US$576 billion, anchored by Samsung and SK hynix building two new fabrication sites each in the country's southwest, alongside regional investment; the broader programme, including data centres, was reported at around US$880 billion over a decade.^[6][7] On the compute side, national plans include 260,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs distributed among major companies, and Naver has partnered with Nvidia and Brookfield to expand a sovereign AI factory from 55 megawatts to 200 megawatts, with its HyperCLOVA X models to be based on open Nemotron models.^[4][8] Meanwhile the memory makers are tightening their grip on the AI supply chain: SK hynix is expected to hold roughly 70% of the HBM4 market for Nvidia's next-generation platform, and Nvidia has cleared Samsung, SK hynix and Micron as suppliers for its Vera Rubin generation.^[3][9]

>See Also

• AI Regulation in South Korea
• Malaysia AI Governance Framework
• National AI Office Malaysia
• NVIDIA
• AI Chip Export Controls