TTA Supports Promotion and Market Expansion for Domestic AI Server Manufacturers

The Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) announced on the 28th that it will promote performance verification to strengthen the competitiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) server manufacturers, which are core infrastructure in the AI market. AI servers refer to servers produced domestically by small and medium-sized enterprises equipped with domestically developed neural processing units (NPU) and graphics processing units (GPU).

According to data from Korea IDC, domestic server market sales have been increasing annually, with 156.4 billion KRW in 2019, 180.1 billion KRW in 2020, and 257.7 billion KRW in 2021. However, global servers occupy 95.5% of the market share. This is because it is difficult to objectively verify the performance of domestically produced servers, and demand companies prefer global companies' servers due to the lack of references they can consult.

Since it is not possible to confirm the actual measured performance after running the applications desired by demand institutions on domestically produced servers equipped with NPU and GPU, demand institutions are reluctant to adopt domestic AI servers. Starting in February, TTA will comprehensively evaluate compatibility with existing systems, stability, and performance (speed, power efficiency) by equipping domestically produced servers with domestic NPUs, promoting objective performance verification of domestically produced servers.

It plans to apply domestically produced servers equipped with domestic NPUs to various application services such as urban facility control and personal information anonymization, operated with support from the Ministry of Science and ICT at the ‘HPC Innovation Hub,’ and issue operation performance certificates through long-term operation for more than six months.

Choi Young-hae, Chairman of TTA, said, "We will support securing reliability and improving recognition of domestic servers equipped with NPUs developed with domestic technology, so that the position of our companies can be strengthened in the domestic AI equipment market monopolized by global companies."