At the CLEVI booth of an exhibiting company at the 1st Industrial AI EXPO held at COEX Magok in Gangseo-gu, Seoul, last September, an official demonstrated the operation of a robot equipped with Physical AI. /Newsis
[Metro Newspaper] As ‘Physical AI’ is being identified as the next stage of the generative artificial intelligence (AI) era, all capabilities are being concentrated—from the government and major IT companies such as Naver to academia, including Seoul National University.
According to reporting by <Metro Economic Newspaper> on the 12th, Physical AI refers to autonomous systems that directly apply AI to the physical world, leading from ‘perception → understanding → action’. While conventional AI relies on digital inputs and outputs such as text and images, Physical AI detects the actual physical environment through cameras, sensors and actuators, and responds in real time or performs tasks.
The reason Physical AI is attracting attention is the recognition that changes in real-world spaces, such as robotics, autonomous vehicles and smart logistics, have limitations if addressed only at the ‘software level’ of AI. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, also recently emphasised that "AI technology is now moving beyond the software level and entering a ‘Physical AI moment’, directly interacting with the physical world."
As Physical AI emerges as the next-generation technology of the AI era, the government has also adopted it as a core national strategy and begun investing a large-scale budget.
The government has allocated 10.1 trillion won, more than three times this year’s 3.3 trillion won, to advance the country into one of the ‘world’s top three AI powers’. To this end, it plans to invest approximately 6 trillion won over the next five years in major industries such as robotics, automotive and shipbuilding. In addition to the 260,000 NVIDIA GPUs secured at the recent South Korea–US summit, the government also announced that it would purchase an additional 15,000 high-performance GPUs, securing a total of 35,000 units ahead of schedule.
In his address on government administration at the National Assembly on the 4th, President Lee Jae-myung described next year’s budget proposal as "South Korea’s first budget proposal to open the AI era" and said, "To achieve the goal of becoming a leading nation in Physical AI, we will use the country’s outstanding manufacturing capabilities to focus investment on key projects." In step with these government moves, domestic IT companies are also making aggressive investments to gain an early lead in the Physical AI market.
Naver, which has surpassed 3 trillion won in quarterly revenue for the first time, has declared that it will strengthen its competitiveness in physical AI technology. In its third-quarter earnings announcement on the 5th, Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon said, "We are confident that our physical AI technology is at a globally leading level," and stated that the company would become a leader in the operating system (OS) and control platform sector, which accounts for approximately 39% of the global robotics market.
To achieve this, Naver expects that it will need to invest more than 1 trillion won in GPUs alone next year. Its key technologies are the robot cloud 'ARC' and the ultra-precise 3D digital twin 'ALIKE'.
CEO Choi emphasised, "'ARC' is a standard OS platform that integrates and manages various robots, and aims to play the role of 'Windows' or 'Android' in the robotics industry," adding, "We will secure new growth engines through this technology."
Academic efforts to support physical AI innovation are also accelerating. Seoul National University will officially launch the Seoul National University Robotics Institute (SNU RI), a research institution specialising in physical AI, next month to secure next-generation AI talent. SNU RI will be led by leading scholars in the global robotics academic community, including Professor Jongwoo Park (former president of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society) and Professor Kyu-Jin Cho (incoming president of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society).
The biggest goal is to retain outstanding talent that is leaving the country. Professor Cho emphasised, "We need to create a research institute that goes beyond simple research and achieves technology demonstrations or commercialisation outcomes that capture the world's attention." To this end, SNU RI will operate as an 'open hub' where academia and industry join forces, with AI start-up representatives and external experts mentoring students and helping them launch businesses.
Ha Jung-woo, Senior Secretary for AI Future Planning at the Presidential Office, said, "To make this new field called physical AI successful, we need not only GPU data and algorithms, but also manufacturing factories, industrial environments and the physical world," adding, "Korea has laid the foundations needed to create a new AI environment, with both manufacturing factories and software capabilities."
Metro Seoul reporter Kim Seo-hyeon [email protected]
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Source: Metro Seoul (reporter Kim Seo-hyeon) | https://www.metroseoul.co.kr/article/20251112500345