South Korean AI startup Upstage is in talks with AMD to purchase up to 10,000 MI355 accelerators.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Upstage’s CEO Sung Kim said that the two companies had discussed the potential purchase during AMD CEO Lisa Su’s visit to Seoul, South Korea, last week.

Following Su’s visit, Upstage had already announced it was expanding its partnership with the chip designer in an agreement that would see the startup deploy an unknown number of MI355 accelerators to support AI initiatives across Korea, including the development of a sovereign AI model as part of Korea's government-led Proprietary AI Foundation Model project.

However, speaking with Bloomberg today (March 23), Kim expanded on some of the details of the partnership, stating: “We have a lot of Nvidia chips in Korea, but we want to diversify to other chips, including AMD’s. That’s why I asked Lisa Su to bring more than 10,000 chips to use in Korea.”

He added that Su “kind of agreed” but that the two companies are now negotiating how they are going to deploy the chips in South Korea.

Founded in 2020 by Kim, a former head of AI development at Naver, Upstage is focused on building domain-specific language models and document processing for the enterprise. To date, the company has raised $157 million in funding and counts SoftBank Ventures Asia and SK Networks among its investors.

In October 2025, Upstage was one of a number of companies Naver said it would partner with for the deployment of some 60,000 Nvidia GPUs across South Korea.