Global DPU market expected to be valued at 100 trillion wons by 2027

Minster Lee “Will take into account qualms in the industrial sector during policy making”

 
Jang Woo Kim, the CEO of Mango Boost (right), explaining the DPU prototype to Jong Ho Lee (left), the Minster of Science and ICT. Provided by the Ministry of Science and ICT.

On the 2^nd, Jong Ho Lee visited Mango Boost, the only DPU startup in Korea. DPU is a next-generation system semiconductor that reduces the workloads of servers in data centers, the ‘hotel of servers’. Minister Lee said that he is “working on a lot of ways to increase the capabilities of domestic system semiconductor companies, which are currently lagging behind foreign companies”, and that he had visited the startup to “reflect the problems the industry is facing during the policy-making process”.

DPU is a system semiconductor that optimizes server efficiency by optimally adjusting the operation of various devices such as CPUs, GPUs, and memory semiconductors in data centers. DPUs are also required to improve the performance of large-scale AI models such as ChatGPT, which is currently a global topic. The system semiconductor is considered one of the “most difficult semiconductors to develop” because it requires software and hardware that concurrently control and manage the entirety of a computer system's resources.

Nvidia, Intel, and Amazon are accelerating their DPU developments. On the other hand, Mango Boost is the only DPU company that has technological significance in Korea. Jang Woo Kim, the CEO of Mango Boost, said, “Global IT companies are concentrating their resources to solve the problem of rapidly increasing maintenance and operation costs as the number of data center servers increases.”, and explained that “DPU is a game changer that can solve this problem”. According to Markets and Markets, a market research firm, the global DPU market is expected to grow to 100 trillion wons by 2027.

Mango Boost was founded by CEO Jang Woo Kim, a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at SNU, and CEO of the US corporation, Eriko Nurvitadhi, who served as an executive in charge of AI accelerator development at Intel. Fifteen of Kim’s students and previous employees of major tech firms such as Samsung Electronics and Microsoft are the founding members of the startup. The company has offices in Seoul and in Seattle, and currently has about 40 employees, the majority being experts holding a Ph.D. CEO Kim said, “We have developed a DPU prototype that can lead the world and are about to further the development to application to data centers.”

Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/community/news?bm=v&bbsidx=53407

Translated by: Do-Hyung Kim, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, kimdohyung@snu.ac.kr