Bae Kyung-hoon, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT, announced today (June 29) a plan to invest 550 trillion won in Artificial Intelligence Data Centers (AIDC) by 2029, with the total investment scale expected to exceed 1 quadrillion won by 2035.

During the National Report Meeting on the Three Mega Projects for South Korea's Great Leap Forward held at the Blue House, Deputy Prime Minister Bae stated, "The global investment planned for AI data centers over the next five years amounts to 5.5 trillion dollars, or approximately 8,400 trillion won in our currency." He added, "Jensen Huang also remarked that this will be the largest infrastructure investment in human history."

"In South Korea, we will pursue an investment of 550 trillion won for AI data centers, equivalent to 8.4 gigawatts (GW), by 2029," Bae said. "We will move beyond the concentration in the capital region to build data centers by region and contribute to regional revitalization."

He further presented a blueprint to build an additional 10GW of AI data centers by 2035, aiming to attract a total investment exceeding 1 quadrillion won.

He also emphasized that as the localization of components and solutions for AI data centers is a critical task, it is necessary to apply AI to all solutions, advance and scale up equipment for AIDC, and package each facility and piece of equipment.

Accordingly, the government plans to actively support the AI data center industry through the construction of cluster ecosystems, the creation of large-scale test labs, human resource development, tax credits, and linkages with the National Growth Fund.

The government will also promote cooperation between solution companies and client companies through an AI Data Center Alliance.

Deputy Prime Minister Bae identified cloud technology and AI semiconductors as key elements for the industrialization of AI data center exports.

He particularly noted the trend of the AI market rapidly expanding from a focus on training to an inference market.

"The inference market is an open ecosystem, which presents an opportunity for Korea," he said. "As domestic Neural Processing Unit (NPU) companies are producing commercialized AI chips after 7 to 8 years of research and development, I ask many companies to take interest and adopt them."

Deputy Prime Minister Bae defined AI data centers as more than just infrastructure, calling them a "token factory."

"Per 1GW, we can produce 40 to 400 trillion tokens, and based on these tokens, physical AI and agentic AI will operate," he emphasized. "We must create a token economy that assigns economic value to these tokens."

He concluded, "Through 'AI for All' based on a token economy, South Korea must become a nation where every citizen can utilize AI without cost burdens and become the world's fastest country to build a basic AI society."

(Photo: Yonhap News)