Korea to invest $367 million to nurture AI, metaverse, digital talent

South Korea plans to spend 453.7 billion won ($367 million) this year to nurture digital talent in the fast-growing business sectors, including the metaverse, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.

With the investment, which is up 12% from last year, Korea aims to nurture about 52,000 talented people in the next-generation industries, the Ministry of Science and ICT said on Thursday.

The investment is part of a government plan to foster one million digital experts by the end of 2026 by increasing digital education opportunities, expanding academic-industrial cooperation and providing incentives to companies hiring digital experts.

Last October, the science ministry launched the Digital Talent Alliance – a government-private sector cooperative body – to provide training courses in the metaverse, AI, cybersecurity and advanced semiconductor businesses.

Companies taking the lead in nurturing digital talent will be classified as members of the Digital Leaders Club and offered incentives for hiring experts, the ministry said.

AI SEMICONDUCTORS & WHITE HACKERS

The ministry said it will establish at least three AI semiconductor-related graduate schools.

Last June, the government said it would spend 1.02 trillion won in the artificial intelligence semiconductor sector and nurture over 7,000 experts to sharpen its competitive edge in the global chip industry.

Korea is home to the world’s two largest memory chipmakers – Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc. – accounting for more than half of the $124.5 billion global market.

However, Korean chipmakers take up a mere 3% of the much larger non-memory or system chip market, which is estimated at $272.4 billion.

The government also plans to offer courses to train “white hats,” or white hackers, an industry term referring to security researchers who spend their time hacking to find vulnerabilities and inform enterprises and web developers of the changes that need to be made.

Write to Han-Gyeol Seon at always@hankyung.com
In-Soo Nam edited this article.