Korea: Miss AI Golden Age, Become AI Laggard

Starventures CEO Moon Ji-eun delivered a strong warning message at ‘GSAT 2025’, presenting Korea’s survival strategy in the chaotic AI era. Speaking on the theme of ‘Agentic AI: Bits of Chaos, Remix of Industries,’ CEO Moon critically assessed Korea's current situation amidst the fierce pursuit by AI powerhouses. According to her, leading M7 companies in the U.S. are driving industrial innovation by actively applying AI to areas such as CRISPR scissors, the AI data industry, and humanoid robots. China is fiercely pursuing the U.S., possessing over 4,700 generative AI companies under its ‘AI+ Action Plan’ and holding 70% of global patents. Japan and Taiwan are also dedicating their full efforts to building AI platforms that could surpass NVIDIA, backed by strong government support. In contrast, Korea is diagnosed as falling short in global private platforms, competitiveness in commercializing super-large AI models, ecosystem expansion, and open collaboration. CEO Moon intensified the sense of crisis by pointing out that the popularization of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) surpassing human intelligence and the replacement of human labor by humanoids will become a reality within five years, and that layoffs due to AI are already occurring in M7 companies, the financial sector, and elsewhere. CEO Moon presented a nationwide blueprint for Korea to emerge as an AI powerhouse. She emphasized the need to build AI data center hub infrastructure to serve as an AI hub in the Asia-Pacific region, and to attract AI technology companies like NVIDIA and CoreWeave, as well as major platform companies. Attracting power infrastructure linked to at least 100MW of renewable energy and SMRs, along with liquid cooling technology companies like Dell PowerCool, is also essential. Furthermore, she stressed the importance of fostering the AI industry ecosystem through the construction of ultra-low latency, high-speed backbone networks, tax reductions and investment subsidies for related companies, easing land use regulations, prioritizing power supply support, designating AI data center special zones, applying regulatory sandboxes, and implementing talent development programs. CEO Moon predicted that such aggressive investment and strategic approaches would lead to immense economic benefits: an additional 40 trillion KRW in GDP creation, the creation of 300,000 high-quality jobs, and 10 trillion KRW in data exports. However, she also warned of the risks of falling behind in the AI competition. Global consulting firm PwC predicted Korea’s potential GDP loss due to AI illiteracy to be 30-50 trillion KRW, and she emphasized that Korea must face the harsh reality that if it loses leadership in the AI market, it could inevitably become an ‘AI colony’ of powerful nations. Futurist and accelerator, CEO Moon Ji-eun, shared profound insights into Korea's AI future. She presented a vision that if Korea supports the role of a testbed for global AI companies and establishes itself as an AI data center hub in the Asia-Pacific region, it could leapfrog to become one of the world's top 3 AI nations by 2035.