Opposition lawmaker Kim Sun-min challenged the Ministry of Science and ICT on Friday over a 2027 budget line that folds sovereign AI data purchases into a much larger frontier-model war chest, intensifying scrutiny of how Korea will pay for trillion-parameter ambitions.
Eight hundred billion won, mostly data
Briefing materials Kim released show 800 billion won allocated next year to strengthen data competitiveness for frontier AI, with 750 billion won earmarked for data support and 50 billion won for cybersecurity training corpora. That compares with 30 billion won in total data spending this year and a prior 25 billion won slice that went directly to Dokpamo finalists for purchasing and labeling datasets.
Under the proposed structure, the Industrial Bank of Korea would receive the 750 billion won and invest in domestic AI companies rather than issuing grants to a fixed consortium. Kim argued the National Assembly deserves a clearer map because ministers have publicly described Dokpamo and frontier development as parallel tracks while budget documents integrate them.
SPC talk and GPU math
Separately, ministry officials continue to review a public-private special-purpose company that could put roughly 5 trillion won in government equity toward a 30 percent stake in a frontier model venture, with private investors covering the rest. Science Minister Bae Kyung-hoon has said Dokpamo will continue through its third evaluation while Korea also pursues frontier-class systems, estimating about 10,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs would be needed for the largest models.
Startup pushback
Upstage CEO Kim Sung-hoon, a Dokpamo finalist, told reporters this week that simply adding GPUs cannot close Korea's gap with Chinese efficiency pioneers without novel training methods. His company just launched Solar Mini 4, a 35-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model aimed at cheap automation rather than raw scale.
Parliament's science committee will parse whether the 750 billion won investment channel duplicates Dokpamo deliverables or finally funds the open-data pipelines frontier models need. Until that debate settles, enterprise buyers will keep buying API access to whichever Korean model ships this quarter, not whichever budget headline wins the hearing room.
Cloud vendors hosting Dokpamo training clusters say they have not received revised procurement schedules, underscoring the gap between budget headlines and rack orders.
Cloud vendors hosting Dokpamo training clusters say they have not received revised procurement schedules, underscoring the gap between budget headlines and rack orders.
LG AI Research and SK Telecom, the other Dokpamo finalists, declined to comment on whether they would join a frontier SPC, leaving Upstage's public skepticism as the loudest corporate voice in the debate.