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ProgrammeGovernmentWorkSouth KoreaReported

South Korea plans 5 trillion won to raise AI use in small manufacturers from 1% to 10% by 2030

See how this story connects

Source: Yonhap News Agency

South Korea’s Ministry of SMEs and Startups announced a strategy on 29 October 2026, at a national policy coordination meeting, to spend more than 5 trillion won on smart manufacturing by 2030. It aims to raise the share of small and medium manufacturers using AI from 1% to 10%, or from 600 to 6,000 firms, and the share that have digitised from 30% to 50%. The government plans to supply manufacturing robots to about 1,000 firms, designate 500 smart manufacturing specialist companies, and let manufacturing data count as a firm’s in-kind contribution to government support programmes.

Why it matters

Small Korean manufacturers can get staged government support, from data collection to AI process tools and robots, and can count their factory data toward their share of the cost.

When
29 Oct 2026
ID
WTA-N-2026-0490
Who
Ministry of SMEs and Startups

Summary written with AI by wheresthe.ai, from Yonhap News Agency. We could not open the primary document, so it is marked Reported. Checked against the source on 29 Oct 2026.

Read the original at Yonhap News Agency

Source copy: saved on 29 Oct 2026 to check this story and not republished, because the text belongs to its publisher. Also held by the Internet Archive.

Next stop on this Storyline: What happened nextSouth Korea sets a 2030 target of 20 AI unicorns and one decacorn

Data to measure this

Compare the years before 2026 with the years since in these series. National sources for South Korea come first.

  • OECD.AI: venture capital investments in AI start-upsOECD.AI (data from Preqin)Venture capital invested in AI start-ups by country and industry, with series for generative AI and AI compute start-ups.live · query tool
  • AI Industry SurveySoftware Policy & Research Institute for the Ministry of Science and ICTKorean AI companies’ sales, exports, workforce, investment and obstacles.Years: 2023-2024 · annual · report only · PDF
  • Crunchbase company and funding dataCrunchbase · paidPrivate company profiles, funding rounds and acquisitions.live · api · API

All data for South Korea

Cite this story

WTA-N-2026-0490: “South Korea plans 5 trillion won to raise AI use in small manufacturers from 1% to 10% by 2030.” wheresthe.ai, 29 Oct 2026. https://wheresthe.ai/d/kr-korea-plans-5-trillion-won-to-raise-ai-use-in-small-manufacturers-2026-10/ (source: Yonhap News Agency).

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