Upstage eyes 10,000 AMD AI accelerators
South Korean AI startup Upstage is negotiating to buy 10,000 AMD AI accelerators to scale large‑scale compute capacity domestically — a sign of growing non‑US demand for advanced chips. (x.com)
Upstage CEO Sung (Sung‑Hoon) Kim met AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su at a Seoul hotel on March 19 to discuss expanded cooperation and the roll‑out of AMD Instinct accelerators in Korea. (koreajoongangdaily.joins.com) AMD participated in a 62 billion‑won (≈$41m) Series B bridge round in Upstage last year, and the companies outlined a multiphase plan to deploy AMD Instinct MI355 accelerators across Upstage’s clusters over the next year to boost LLM training and document‑processing workloads. (koreajoongangdaily.joins.com) Upstage is a contestant in South Korea’s government‑backed “AI Squid Game” and said it is preparing an approximately 200‑billion‑parameter foundation model for the summer round, aiming to reach the competition’s finalist stage by early next year. (bloomberg.com) On March 18 AMD and Samsung signed an MOU to align HBM4 memory supply and DDR5 support for AMD’s next‑gen Instinct MI455X GPUs, a move that tightens AMD’s local memory supply corridor in Korea and could influence delivery timelines for regional Instinct deployments. (news.samsungsemiconductor.com) Upstage told Bloomberg it wants to diversify away from Nvidia hardware and is targeting sovereign, in‑country AI deployments in markets such as Vietnam and the UAE as part of a push to sell turnkey national AI systems. (bloomberg.com) Market reaction to the talks was muted: premarket trading showed a modest slip in AMD shares even as analysts flag the deal as a potential pathway for AMD to expand in Asia’s national‑AI builds. (stocktwits.com)
