Korea’s science minister pushes AI innovation to lift economic growth

Korea’s science minister is effectively telling the country’s industrial giants that AI is now a macro‑level growth lever, not just an IT upgrade. By explicitly tying “world-class AI models” to sectors like shipbuilding, defense and bio, the government is signaling that it wants domestically controlled capabilities that can be embedded in strategic export industries. That’s a familiar playbook—Korea used similar state‑industry coordination in semiconductors and displays—but applied now to frontier AI.

For the global race to AGI, this matters in two ways. First, it increases competitive pressure on Japan and other Asian economies to articulate similarly aggressive AI industrial policies, further globalizing the race beyond the US‑China duopoly. Second, when a government with Korea’s manufacturing footprint leans into AI, it creates a strong pull for applied research talent, specialized chips and national compute infrastructure. Even if Korea doesn’t build its own GPT‑class model, it can become a major hub for high‑value, safety‑critical applications.

For big players like Samsung and SK, this is a political green light to double down on AI fabs, memory, and model‑hosting infrastructure. That could make Korea one of the most important supply‑side actors in the AGI race, even if its consumer‑facing models remain less visible internationally.