South Korea's Deputy PM: Cannot Afford to Slow AI Progress

South Korea's deputy prime minister said on Wednesday that the country must continue advancing artificial intelligence without pause or delay, taking a clear stance in global discussions on the pace of the technology's development. South Korea, home to memory chip makers such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, is a major beneficiary of the AI data center boom, with related demand driving robust procurement of its semiconductors and hardware. With a population of about 52 million, the country cannot slow its own progress in the direction proposed by the heads of U.S. AI model developers Anthropic and OpenAI.