South Korea rolls out a national free AI program, with 512 B200 units as core support; Motif 3, billed as the "top Korean AI model" that failed to make the national AI team, still secures access to the initiative.

Insight Beating AI Flash News: South Korea is set to launch a test of a free national AI service starting in September. A consortium of SK Telecom, KT, and Kakao has won the bid, with the service officially launching by the end of the year. South Korean citizens will use it for free, with no token limits. The government will provide the three firms with a total of 512 Nvidia B200 GPUs this year. Based on estimates of 4 user queries per day and 500 tokens per response, this batch of GPUs can theoretically support around 18.4 million daily active users (DAUs). The government also mandates that at least half of the AI services be powered by South Korea’s domestic base models, with an additional minimum of 30% allocated to models from other South Korean companies. Motif 3, which was eliminated from South Korea’s "national team" selection process earlier, has now been included in both SK Telecom’s and KT’s model pools for this project. Motif 3 scored 47 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, the highest among all South Korean models that participated, yet was eliminated in the August 18 review for the "domestic base model national team". Ten days later, for the national AI project, both SK Telecom and KT added it to their model pools. Its exclusion from the "national team" does not prevent it from being used by users nationwide. South Korea currently has around 23 million generative AI users, most of whom still rely on overseas products like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. As such, this review did not prioritize model performance: service reach and user acquisition account for 50 points, while model quality, stability, and security combined make up only 30 points. The final winners are SK Telecom, KT, and Kakao, which control communications, portal, and super app entry points, while model firms mostly serve as back-end suppliers.