Key Points
- South Korea and Arm signed an agreement to boost the country’s AI and semiconductor industries.
- Arm will establish a chip design school in South Korea to train 1,400 specialists. The goal is to strengthen South Korea’s “fabless” chip design capabilities.
- SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son warned that South Korea needs more energy to support its AI goals.
- The deal is part of a larger national strategy that involves partnerships with other tech giants, such as Nvidia and OpenAI.
South Korea is teaming up with Arm, the British chip design giant, to bolster its national ambitions in artificial intelligence and semiconductors. The two signed a major agreement on Friday that includes a plan for Arm to open a new chip design school in the country.
The new program aims to train around 1,400 high-level specialists. A presidential adviser explained that this will help strengthen South Korea’s relatively weak areas in chip design, known as the “fabless” sector, where companies design chips but don’t manufacture them.
The deal came as SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, whose company owns Arm, met with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung. Son predicted that the explosive growth of AI will create a dramatic demand for more powerful chips. However, he also warned that South Korea’s energy supply could be a weak point in supporting this AI expansion.
Son repeated his belief that AI will eventually become “10,000 times smarter than people,” and said humanity must learn to live with it rather than try to control it.
This partnership is part of South Korea’s broader push to become a top-three global AI power. President Lee has recently met with other tech leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
Major Korean companies like Samsung and SK Hynix are already set to supply memory chips for OpenAI’s massive data center projects, and Nvidia is shipping hundreds of thousands of its most advanced AI chips to the country.
