Semiconductor with a South Korean flag. South Korea’s AI expansion needs cloud computing before it realizes its semiconductor ambitions. (Shutterstock/Tang Yan Song)

To Lead in AI, the US and South Korea Need to Trust Each Other’s Clouds

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As South Korea builds its data centers, commercial cloud computing is a necessary stopgap to fuel its AI boom.

South Korea wants to become an artificial intelligence powerhouse alongside the United States. But Seoul’s cloud rules could make that harder than it needs to be. In September 2025, President Lee Jae-myung launched the National AI Strategy Committee to make Korea a top AI power alongside the United States. In June, he backed that ambition with a 10-year, $880 billion plan for semiconductors and AI data centers. South Korea has also set a goal of achieving 95 percent AI adoption across the public sector by 2030.

Those ambitions require more than GPUs. They require the ability to put those chips to work securely, which means giving government agencies access to scalable cloud infrastructure.

Approval to provide it has been slow, though. Providers handling government data must clear a review process requiring physical separation—dedicated hardware for government data rather than software isolation on shared servers. If maintained, that requirement would exclude providers unwilling to duplicate infrastructure they already........

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