Chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA) was in focus on Tuesday, after South Korea announced it was looking to secure 10,000 high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) this year for its national AI computing centre.
In a statement on Monday, South Korea’s acting president Choi Sang-mok said: “As competition for dominance in the AI industry intensifies, the competitive landscape is shifting from battles between companies to a full-scale rivalry between national innovation ecosystems.”
Nvidia (NVDA) holds around an 80% share of the global GPU market, according to Reuters.
Shares in the chipmaker were flat in pre-market trading on Tuesday, with US markets set to re-open later in the day after a closure on Monday for President’s Day.
Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown (HL.L), said that South Korea’s announcement “should be seen as another proof point that Nvidia’s (NVDA) demand extends well beyond the giant US tech companies.
“We’ve now seen several countries express an appetite for building their own computing clusters, with the massive US Stargate project grabbing the most headlines,” he said. “This is supportive to the Nvidia investment case and presents a relatively new and scalable demand avenue for its market leading chips.”