A five-year expansion across AI segments

The claim of about 30% annual growth aligns with the trajectory of AI spending reported across major market trackers, which have documented sustained double-digit expansion in areas including AI software, services, and the underlying hardware. Growth has been fueled by rising enterprise adoption of machine learning, the spread of large language models (LLMs), and surging demand for data center infrastructure.

Korean semiconductor and hardware suppliers sit at the center of the boom

For Korea's tech industry, the trend has direct implications. Semiconductor makers such as Samsung Electronics and SK hynix supply memory — including high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in AI accelerators — that has become a critical bottleneck in the buildout of AI compute capacity. Demand for GPUs has similarly driven investment across the graphics card and data center supply chains.

Caveats around the exact figure

While the direction of growth is undisputed, a single universal "30% per year" figure carries uncertainty: market size estimates differ depending on whether AI hardware, software, or services are counted, and forecasts from different research firms are not uniform. The claim should therefore be read as an approximate characterization of a fast-growing market rather than a precise measurement.

Taken together, the claim that the global AI market has expanded about 30% annually over the past five years is broadly supported by the underlying data, with the caveat that individual estimates vary. Verdict: Mostly True