South Korea wants to triple its spending on artificial intelligence (AI) next year for “national survival” amid a change in global economic order in the face of rapid AI advancements.
In Qatar, local IT solutions provider MEEZA has launched MAI, a unified AI platform that offers GPU-as-a-service to power the country’s digital transformation.
South Korea is tripling down on AI
South Korea will prioritize AI to grow its sluggish economy, President Lee Jae Myung says. In his first budget speech since taking over the East Asian nation in June, Lee announced significant bumps to the country’s AI spending as he pledged to keep up with the United States and China in the AI race.
Lee’s government will invest 10 trillion won ($7 billion) in AI in the next fiscal year, triple what the previous administration allocated to the sector in 2025. This budget will catapult South Korea “into the ranks of the world’s top three AI powers,” he believes. The spending is part of a 728 trillion won ($511 billion) budget proposal that now awaits parliament’s approval.
“In the AI era, being late by a single day means falling behind by an entire generation. Since we got off to a late start, we must now move faster and work harder to catch up with the frontrunners—only then will we have a chance,” he told lawmakers.
South Korea has lagged in the AI race as the U.S. and China set the pace globally, with others like the United Kingdom and India pulling ahead in their regions. South Korea has long been a leader in building the chips that power AI, but it has not replicated this leadership in the AI models’ sector. The Korean language is also spoken by around 80 million people globally—compared to 1.5 billion English and 1.2 billion Chinese speakers—which limits access to large-scale training data.
Still, the Lee administration is determined to position South Korea as a global AI powerhouse.
At the recent 2025 Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) Summit, the government announced a new partnership with chip-making giant Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), with the American giant set to supply hundreds of thousands of GPUs to power AI in Korea.
Under the deal, Nvidia will export 260,000 of its most advanced chips to Korea, with 50,000 going to the government for a national data center. Samsung, SK, and Hyundai (NASDAQ: HYDTF) will receive 50,000 GPUs each, with Internet firm Naver getting 60,000 chips.
South Korea will become one of the few countries allowed to receive the latest BlackWell GPUs from Nvidia. The Trump administration is keen on limiting its availability to other nations to give American firms an advantage.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expressed support for South Korea’s AI ambitions, saying there’s no reason it can’t join the U.S. and China as the three AI superpowers.
“…you have the technology, you have the software expertise, and you also have a natural ability to build manufacturing plants,” Huang stated.
Qatar’s new unified AI platform
In Qatar, a local tech firm has launched a new unified AI platform that it says will power the country’s sovereign digital transformation.
MEEZA, a Doha-based cloud and cybersecurity solutions provider, recently announced the launch of MAI, a platform that offers access to its GPU-as-a-service offering for its Qatari clients. MAI will also offer access to MEEZA’s Next Generation Managed Services (MSNG), which enables users to chat with their data and files through AI-powered analytics.
The company says the new platform will integrate with most existing enterprise systems, allowing users to “detect, analyze, and resolve performance issues faster, while optimizing cost and compliance through intelligent insights.”
“MSNG marks a new era in managed services. It’s not just about monitoring — it’s about understanding and conversing with your IT environment in real time. We are helping our customers move from reactive to predictive operations,” commented CEO Mohammed Ali Al-Ghaithani.
However, it’s the GPU-as-a-service offering that could hand a massive boost to Qatar’s lofty AI ambitions. The service will provide Qatari developers, academics, enterprises, and researchers with computing power for all their AI and machine learning needs. The service is hosted entirely within Qatar, which builds on the government’s goal of full AI and data sovereignty.
The new service comes two months after MEEZA secured a QAR 800 million ($220 million) credit facility from a local lender to build a 44 MW data center.
In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI.
Watch: Demonstrating the potential of blockchain’s fusion with AI
title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen=””>
Source: https://coingeek.com/south-korea-triples-ai-spending-qatar-launches-unified-ai-platform/