South Korea Allocates 27.5 Billion Won Per Rack for NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI Chips

ChainCatcher report, according to Money Today, the South Korean government has allocated a budget of 27.5 billion KRW per rack for NVIDIA’s next-generation AI chip, Vera Rubin, to be introduced next year—higher than previous estimates by foreign media. The Ministry of Science and ICT has allocated 3.85 trillion KRW next year for GPU server expansion, entirely for the procurement of 140 Vera Rubin NVL72 server racks. Each NVL72 rack is equipped with 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs, totaling 10,080 Rubin GPUs. This batch is separate from the ministry’s previously announced plan to acquire 52,000 advanced GPUs by 2028, and actual delivery volumes may be adjusted based on NVIDIA’s supply conditions. The budget of 27.5 billion KRW per rack is significantly higher than foreign media projections. In its June report, U.S. investment bank Bernstein estimated the cost of a Vera Rubin NVL72 rack at $9.1 million (approximately 12.3 billion KRW), while Morgan Stanley estimated it at around $7.8 million (approximately 10.5 billion KRW). The government stated that the budget accounts for potential price increases due to GPU shortages and associated infrastructure costs. These chips will be used for developing next-generation frontier models, such as general artificial intelligence. Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT, Bae Kyung-hoon, stated in June that building a model comparable to Anthropic’s massive Mythos model would require approximately 10,000 Vera Rubin chips—a scale consistent with this procurement of 140 racks.