South Korea AI Processor Chip Market Size and Forecast by Hardware Architecture, Power Envelope, Memory Integration Type, Node Type, and End User: 2019-2033

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Industry Assessment Overview

Industry Findings: Regulatory certainty and memory-prioritised procurement dominate South Korea’s compute demand profile as the state balances industrial competitiveness with trust and safety. Lawmakers advanced the AI Basic Act in Dec-2024, creating a national framework that mandates transparency, establishes implementation bodies and sets compliance timelines for high-impact systems. That legislative milestone forces enterprise buyers and public agencies to favour accelerators that provide deterministic telemetry and reproducible inference metrics out of the box. Near term, procurement teams will weigh auditability and explainability as hard selection criteria for hardware–software stacks; over the medium term, the law will push vendors to embed provenance, logging and certified toolchains into product roadmaps to remain eligible for government and regulated-industry tenders.

Industry Player Insights: South Korea’s market transformation is influenced by Samsung, SK hynix, LG Electronics, and Naver etc. Samsung announced the development of a 36GB HBM3E 12-stack memory architecture in Feb-2024, accelerating the memory roadmap available to AI accelerator designers and narrowing the gap with incumbent HBM suppliers. SK hynix began volume production of HBM3E in Mar-2024, bolstering regional memory availability for domestic and export-oriented accelerator builders and easing short-term supply constraints for high-bandwidth inference platforms. These supplier moves materially improve memory-side throughput options for Korean integrators and increase the feasibility of domestic rack-level AI solutions for hyperscalers and industrial OEMs.