The new administration under South Korea’s President Lee Jae-myung is showcasing bold ambitions when it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI). The president has not only proposed an investment of KRW 100 trillion (US$ 735 billion) into developing a sovereign AI trained on Korean cultural and historical data, he has also named Ha Jung-woo its first ever Chief Secretary for AI Policy.
Ha, head of the Future AI Centre at the country’s popular web portal and search engine Naver, advocates a public-private model in which the government supports infrastructure and AI outcomes are shared as open-source tools according to Chosun Daily. The announcement led to a strong rally at the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI), with stock prices rising on two consecutive days.
Readers would recall that last December, South Korea passed the Artificial Intelligence and Establishment of Trust (AI Basic Act), which is set to take effect in January 2026. This Act is a comprehensive framework for AI regulation, and assigns responsibilities to AI developers (who create AI systems) and AI operators (who integrate AI into products or services). The act also places obligations on the government.
In February 2025, a 3GW data center was announced in Jeollanam-do province. The project, a collaboration between LG scion Brian Koo, Dr. Amin Badr-El-Din, and Stock Farm Road, in partnership with Jeollanam-do province, is valued at over $10 billion and could reach $35 billion. It is set for completion by 2028. The project’s backers see the center as a catalyst for next-generation AI, capitalizing on a market projected to reach $438.70 billion by 2028.
Then, in early March, on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2025, SK Telecom revealed that it was planning a data center that will house 60,000 Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) with a power consumption capacity of 100 MW. The company aims to expand the facility’s capacity to 1 to 2GW in future, making it one of the biggest data centers in South Korea.
SK Group has now revealed that this facility will be built in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Ulsan Mipo National Industrial Complex. The Chosun Daily reports that the project will be built in phases, beginning with a 41-megawatt (MW) facility slated for completion by November 2027. The second phase will expand capacity to 103MW by February 2029. Readers would recall that SK Telecom launched its first AI data center in Seoul last year, introducing cloud-based GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS).
