A government program offering graphics processing units to companies, universities and research institutes for artificial intelligence research drew applications for more than three times the volume it had planned to supply.
In the first round of the program, 514 proposals sought a combined 13,712 GPUs, according to data the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) submitted to the office of Kim Sun-min, a lawmaker of the Rebuilding Korea Party, on the 5th. The agency allocated 4,224 units, or 30.8% of the volume requested. The government had initially planned to provide about 4,000 GPUs.
Measured by proposals, only 160 of the 514 were selected, a success rate of 31.1%. That left roughly seven of every 10 applications without support. Demand for high-performance computing has surged with the spread of generative AI, concentrating requests on the government program from small and venture businesses, universities and research institutes that cannot build their own GPU infrastructure.
"The government should not stop at one-off support," Kim said. "It needs to boldly expand the scale of GPU support in line with surging demand to underpin AI competitiveness."
