NIA Head Kim Eun-ju: 'Domestic NPU is Key Foundation for AI Sovereignty... Public Adoption Will Jump-start Market'

Kim Eun-ju, head of the National Information Society Agency (NIA), emphasized on the 14th that the domestic Neural Processing Unit (NPU) is the core foundation of AI sovereignty, stating that preemptive adoption by the public sector will serve as a catalyst for entering the initial market.

Domestic NPUs are evaluated as chips that consume less power and offer higher cost-efficiency compared to Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). As the center of gravity in the AI market shifts toward inference for actual services, the government is designating them as core hardware for AI sovereignty and accelerating their distribution in the public sector.

The government is pushing specific projects, such as converting 50,000 public closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems to NPU-based AI monitoring systems over the next five years starting this year. Separately, in the defense sector, a project is underway to replace the Navy's CCTVs with a domestic NPU-based AI surveillance system.