AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su greets attendees at the AMD Gamer Day event at Seoul Dragon City in Yongsan District, central Seoul, on Oct. 7, the same day she announced plans for an AI research center in Korea.NEWS1
U.S. chipmaker AMD plans to open an AI research center in Korea by the end of this year and hire hundreds of AI researchers, CEO Lisa Su said Wednesday.
The plan would make Korea a base for AMD's global AI research and collaboration. The company also intends to sharply expand its work with Korean AI chip companies and startups.
Su laid out plans for the AMD AI center of excellence in Koreain a meeting with Ryu Je-myung, second vice minister of science and ICT, at the Four Seasons Hotel Seoul in central Seoul.
The AMD Chair and CEO told Ryu that AMD would hire several hundred AI researchers, not only to advance AI technology but also to help support Korea's AI ecosystem.
AMD agreed to set up the center under an MOU it signed with the ministry in July. The center would support its global AI software development and explore computing setups that combine AMD CPUs and GPUs with Korean-developed neural processing units (NPUs).
AMD is also accelerating the expansion of AI computing infrastructure in Korea. It is adding computing capacity so that Korean AI startups and ordinary users can use AI more easily, Su said, and it has built its first such cloud facility with MangoBoost, an AI infrastructure company founded at Seoul National University.
AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su greets attendees at the AMD Gamer Day event at Seoul Dragon City in Yongsan District, central Seoul, on Oct. 7, the same day she announced plans for an AI research center in Korea.NEWS1
Su also pointed to a separate MOU that AMD signed with Seoul National University's AI institute on Sept. 28. Under that agreement, AMD provides the institute with 50,000 GPU hours of remote computing on its Instinct AI chips, as well as on-site servers and workstations, for joint research and education.
Su said the company would widen its cooperation with Korean universities and startups.
Ryu said AMD has been quick to deliver on its commitments under the July MOU. With the AI inference market growing fast, he asked AMD, as a global chipmaker, to work actively with Korean NPU startups.
Ryu also called for broader cooperation on building an open AI computing ecosystem, which he said Korean industry, the government and AMD all see as the right direction.
AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su and Second Vice Minister of Science and ICT Ryu Je-myung applaud as they enter a roundtable with Korean AI chip companies at the Four Seasons Hotel Seoul in Jongno District, central Seoul, on Oct. 7.NEWS1
The meeting was arranged as a follow-up to the July MOU, which the ministry and AMD signed when President Lee Jae Myung hosted an AI summit in San Francisco.
After the meeting, AMD held a roundtable with 14 Korean AI chip, software and cloud companies, including Rebellions, FuriosaAI and MangoBoost, to discuss specific ways to cooperate.
The ministry plans to review the companies' proposals, tie them to its follow-up measures under the existing MOU and develop them into joint projects.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
