South Korea expects the NVIDIA GPUs it has on order to keep arriving on schedule. Ryu Je-myung, the country’s second vice minister of science and ICT, said at the National Assembly’s budget committee that, for now, he expects no disruption to production or to deliveries of the contracted chips.
He was answering a lawmaker’s questions about the controversy around NVIDIA, whose board has opened an independent investigation into reports that CEO Jensen Huang was the target of a foreign intelligence effort.
The 10,000 GPUs Korea bought with its 2025 supplementary budget are already in the country and in use, Ryu said. For this year, the GPUs that can be delivered and put into service before the year is out are under contract and arriving now.
The government doesn’t buy them from NVIDIA directly, but through vendors that supply NVIDIA servers. The ministry is in talks with NVIDIA Korea on prices and delivery dates, and Ryu added that the ministry will have to watch how the past few days’ news affects NVIDIA.
NVIDIA, meanwhile, is letting a Korean AI chip into its racks. NVIDIA, Rebellions and SK Telecom announce that Rebellions, a Korean AI chip startup, will use NVLink Fusion to connect its next-generation R200 chips to NVIDIA’s rack-scale platform, and build the systems on NVIDIA’s MGX rack design.
Inside a rack, the R200s will link up over NVIDIA’s own NVLink. The plan splits each AI reply between two kinds of chip: NVIDIA GPUs process the prompt, and the R200s write the answer, which the companies say should improve throughput and power efficiency.
SK Telecom, one of Rebellions’ backers, plans to run the systems in its AI data center, alongside its own A.X K2 model and public services under Korea’s AI for All project. The R200 systems are expected to be ready for deployment in 2028.
Korea’s science ministry is backing the deal. Deputy Prime Minister and Science Minister Bae Kyung-hoon says the government will further its cooperation with NVIDIA in areas “including physical AI and securing GPU supply.”
