South Korea will budget 27.5 billion won per rack for Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin AI chips to be introduced next year, according to Money Today. According to ChainCatcher, the Ministry of Science and ICT plans to spend 3.85 trillion won next year to expand GPU servers, with all funds allocated to purchasing 140 Vera Rubin NVL72 server racks.

Each NVL72 rack includes 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs, for a total of 10,080 Rubin GPUs across the batch. The purchase is separate from the ministry's previously announced plan to secure 52,000 advanced GPUs by 2028, and the final supply may change depending on Nvidia's delivery situation.

The reported per-rack budget is above earlier estimates from foreign media. Bernstein estimated the cost of a Vera Rubin NVL72 rack at $9.1 million in June, while Morgan Stanley estimated about $7.8 million. The government said the budget accounts for possible GPU shortages and related infrastructure costs.

The chips will be used to develop next-generation frontier models, including artificial general intelligence. Deputy Prime Minister and Science and ICT Minister Bae Kyung-hoon said in June that building a model on the level of Anthropic's large-scale model Mythos would require about 10,000 Vera Rubin chips, making the planned 140-rack scale comparable.