Key Takeaways:
Upstage is negotiating to purchase 10,000 AMD MI355 accelerator chips to build computing infrastructure.
The design is to reduce the company’s dependence on NVIDIA and support South Korea’s AI sovereignty.
CEO Sung Kim confirmed the discussions with a meeting with AMD CEO Lisa Su in Seoul last week.
A Strategic Shift to Diversify AI Hardware
Upstage is in negotiations with AMD to purchase 10,000 of the latest MI355 AI accelerator chips. In an interview with Bloomberg Television on March 22, 2026, Upstage CEO Sung Kim confirmed that he met with AMD CEO Lisa Su in Seoul last week to finalize the details of this deal. Kim explained that the company wants to diversify hardware options while Upstage will use many NVIDIA chips. Upstage wants to build a flexible and stable computing infrastructure that can power the generation of tools in South Korea by moving away from a single supplier.
Powering the Solar LLM and National AI Goals
The reason for this investment is to speed up the development of Upstage’s Solar Large Language Model (LLM). Upstage plans to build models with more than 100 billion parameters by merging AMD’s Instinct MI355 GPUs and the ROCm software platform. This technology will be used to serve private businesses and government agencies. The partnership which was announced as an expansion is an important part of an effort to achieve AI sovereignty. This means that South Korea wants to create independent AI systems rather than relying on technology in other countries and the market monopoly held by NVIDIA.
Expanding the AI Ecosystem in Asia-Pacific
An order of this size from a Korean firm represents a victory in the Asia Pacific region. It will prove that there is a global demand for high performance alternatives to NVIDIA’s hardware. These 10,000 chips will provide the computing power needed to participate in a national AI competition supported by the South Korean government. The company will move fast to prepare infrastructure.
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