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Korean AI Startup Upstage Is in Talks to Buy 10,000 AMD MI355X Accelerators
South Korean AI startup Upstage is in discussions with AMD to purchase 10,000 MI355X accelerators, according to Bloomberg, and the story is worth paying attention to for reasons that go beyond the headline number.
Upstage CEO Sung Kim confirmed the talks after meeting AMD CEO Lisa Su in Seoul last week. The quote he gave Bloomberg is the most interesting part of the whole thing: “We have a lot of Nvidia chips in Korea, but we want to diversify to other chips, including AMD’s.” That is not a complaint about Nvidia. It is a deliberate infrastructure strategy, and it is one that more organisations are starting to think seriously about as GPU supply constraints and vendor concentration risk become real operational concerns.
AMD is already an investor in Upstage, having participated in its Series B funding round. So this is not a cold commercial negotiation. It is a deepening of an existing relationship, with Upstage looking to put AMD silicon to work on its Solar language model and on Korea’s national AI foundation model programme. That programme, which the press has taken to calling the “AI Squid Game” after the Netflix series, pits four teams against each other in a government-backed competition evaluated every six months by the Ministry of Science and ICT. Two finalists will be selected by early next year, with the winners receiving additional allocations of Nvidia GPUs. Upstage is currently preparing a model with around 200 billion parameters for the upcoming summer evaluation round.
The MI355X is AMD’s latest Instinct accelerator, built on CDNA 4 architecture with 288 GB of HBM3E memory per card and 8 TB/s of memory bandwidth. Those are serious specifications, and the memory capacity, in particular, is the one that matters most for large-model inference. Running a 200B parameter model requires memory headroom that most accelerators simply cannot provide without aggressive quantisation or multi-node splitting. The MI355X’s memory capacity addresses that directly, and it is part of why AMD has been picking up large-scale enterprise AI commitments from organisations looking for alternatives to Nvidia’s HGX lineup.
The scale of this potential deal, 10,000 cards, would represent a meaningful deployment by any standard. At 288 GB per card, that is 2.88 petabytes of HBM3E accelerator memory if the full order goes through. That level of compute density requires serious infrastructure planning, and it signals that Upstage is not treating this as a trial run. Kim also confirmed that the company is targeting international expansion into markets such as Vietnam and the UAE with sovereign AI systems, which means this compute build-out is not just for domestic competition.
From AMD’s perspective, this is exactly the kind of deal the company needs to keep building momentum in a market that Nvidia still dominates by a considerable margin. AMD’s ROCm software stack has historically been the sticking point for organisations considering a switch, but the gap has narrowed enough that enterprises and startups alike are increasingly willing to run mixed deployments rather than treating Nvidia as the only viable option. The process technology underpinning the MI355X also matters here: TSMC’s capacity constraints at advanced nodes affect every major chip customer, and AMD’s ability to deliver at scale is a real consideration for any organisation planning a large procurement.
It is also worth noting the broader context AMD is operating in. The company has been under market pressure recently, with its stock declining in premarket trading on Monday despite the Upstage news, largely due to macro concerns around Middle East tensions and their effect on supply chains. But the underlying demand signal from deals like this one is clear: there is a growing pool of organisations that want high-performance AI compute, have specific memory and throughput requirements, and are actively looking beyond Nvidia to meet them. AMD’s efficiency advantage over competing x86 architectures is part of what makes its Instinct lineup credible for power-conscious deployments at scale.
The discussions are ongoing rather than finalised, and procurement at this scale involves logistics, software support commitments, and pricing negotiations that take time to close. But the direction of travel is clear. Korea is building serious AI infrastructure, Upstage is positioning itself as a competitive player in that environment, and AMD is the chip partner they are turning to for the next phase of that build-out.
