British Fabless Firm Arm: "South Korea Is a Rare Market Covering the Entire Semiconductor Supply Chain"

'Arm Unlocked Seoul 2025' Held in Seoul
Vice President: "Korea, a Market with Major Players Across the Entire Supply Chain"
Rebellions Joins ATD... Collaboration Experience with Samsung and Others
Anticipating Cooperation on High-Efficiency AI Chips and Data Centers

British semiconductor design company (fabless) Arm has recognized the significance and position of South Korea in the global semiconductor market, expressing its strong commitment to further cooperation and investment in the country.

Eddie Ramirez, Vice President of Arm Infrastructure Business Unit, is explaining the company's strategy at the 'Arm Unlocked Seoul 2025' media briefing held on the morning of the 21st at the Grand Intercontinental Seoul Parnas Hotel in Samseong-dong, Seoul. Photo by Golin

At the 'Arm Unlocked Seoul 2025' media briefing held on the morning of the 21st at the Grand Intercontinental Seoul Parnas Hotel in Samseong-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Eddie Ramirez, Vice President of Arm Infrastructure Business Unit, described South Korea as "a rare market where major players are active across the entire semiconductor supply chain." He noted that there are very few countries where the entire semiconductor lifecycle-including foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing), AI application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design, and packaging-has formed a single ecosystem, and South Korea is one of them. Ramirez also emphasized, "It is important that the Korean government has set artificial intelligence (AI) as a strategic initiative and is making significant investments in this area."

Arm has determined that the rapidly growing AI market requires a large volume of custom AI chips for data centers, and is focusing on developing custom AI chips based on 'chiplet' design. The company is also committed to building an open ecosystem by making chip production, structuring, and design accessible, enabling collaboration with many companies.

This process has highlighted collaboration with Korean companies. Just the previous day, Korean AI semiconductor startup Rebellions officially joined as a partner in the 'Arm Total Design (ATD)' program. In 2023, under the project name 'Reflow,' Samsung Electronics Foundry, Rebellions, and ADTechnology-Korean companies-collaborated to develop an AI platform. Regarding this project, Ramirez explained, "We developed an AI inference chip that can be realized in actual silicon form," adding, "We have significantly improved the power efficiency of AI computations."

Arm also announced plans to continue expanding its collaborative ecosystem. Through this, the company aims to build AI chips and data centers with reduced power consumption and efficient energy structures. Arm believes that achieving this goal requires the cooperation of many companies. Ramirez stated, "The demand for AI computation is growing explosively, and by 2025, it is expected to reach 16 zettaFLOPS (16 sextillion operations per second). If this trend continues, additional power demand could reach 160 GW by 2030, which is equivalent to the total electricity consumption of all U.S. households." He further emphasized, "It is essential to transition to an efficient energy structure, from AI server rack design to data center operation."

Ramirez also presented a vision to provide solutions that can dramatically reduce the time required to build data centers. He said, "Constructing a data center typically takes 2 to 3 years just for the building itself, but Arm, leveraging its experience and expertise in deploying AI hardware, aims to shorten the design period to within one year."