# South Korea Bets $919B on Sovereign AI Infrastructure

> South Korea has laid out one of the most aggressive national AI plans yet, a sovereign infrastructure push it values at around 919 billion dollars over the next decade. The first phase alone commits roughly 369 billion dollars to build 8.4 gigawatts of data-center capacity by 2029, with an eventual target of 18.4 gigawatts by 2035. The design is unusually coordinated. The government plans a tournament to pick a national foundation-model champion, then shares the compute across major players including SK, GS and Naver rather than betting on a single winner. More than 50,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs are slated for the first wave, spread across a national cloud and domestic IT providers. The word doing the work here is sovereign. Rather than renting intelligence from American clouds, Seoul wants the models, the chips and the power to sit inside its own borders. Folded into a wider effort that includes a 230 billion dollar Samsung commitment, it is a bet that in the next decade AI capacity will be treated less like a service and more like national infrastructure, on par with grids and highways.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: Light Reading · Published Friday, September 4, 2026_

## Wortins' read

South Korea has laid out one of the most aggressive national AI plans yet, a sovereign infrastructure push it values at around 919 billion dollars over the next decade. The first phase alone commits roughly 369 billion dollars to build 8.4 gigawatts of data-center capacity by 2029, with an eventual target of 18.4 gigawatts by 2035. The design is unusually coordinated. The government plans a tournament to pick a national foundation-model champion, then shares the compute across major players including SK, GS and Naver rather than betting on a single winner. More than 50,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs are slated for the first wave, spread across a national cloud and domestic IT providers. The word doing the work here is sovereign. Rather than renting intelligence from American clouds, Seoul wants the models, the chips and the power to sit inside its own borders. Folded into a wider effort that includes a 230 billion dollar Samsung commitment, it is a bet that in the next decade AI capacity will be treated less like a service and more like national infrastructure, on par with grids and highways.

## Source

[Read the full story at Light Reading](https://www.lightreading.com/data-centers/south-korea-plans-massive-18-4gw-ai-data-center-buildout-by-2035)

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