KakaoBank, the South Korea-based mobile bank, has established an artificial intelligence (AI) lab at Digital Realty’s ICN10 data centre in Seoul.
This strategic investment, leveraging Digital Realty’s data centre infrastructure and expertise, is expected to empower KakaoBank to accelerate its AI-powered service enhancements, develop personalised content, and fuel research and development for new financial services.
KakaoBank chose Digital Realty’s ICN10 data centre for its ability to deliver a dedicated, high-performance, and resilient environment with optimised cooling, layout, and connectivity options, to support highly effective AI deployments.
Advanced AI workloads, such as generative AI, demand precision-engineered power and cooling infrastructure capable of supporting high-power computing needs.
Digital Realty’s modular and flexible data centre design enabled KakaoBank to quickly deploy their AI solution at ICN10, with room to scale as their needs evolve.
Further, ICN10’s dedicated access to AWS Direct Connect enables KakaoBank to connect their private infrastructure to AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region, providing a low-latency, high-performance, secure, and cost-effective connectivity solution.
ICN10’s central location in Seoul’s Digital Media City, coupled with its network-neutral environment, promises KakaoBank an edge by minimising latency and providing a multitude of connectivity options to existing data centres of domestic financial institutions across the country.
Hyun-chul Ahn, chief research and development officer of KakaoBank, said that through the opening of the AI centre, they have created an environment to strengthen collaboration with the Kakao community, external academia, and companies.
“We plan to accelerate various AI-based businesses and research requiring complex operations, such as generative AI and language models, to gain more customers and continue to grow by enhancing our technological capabilities,” said Ahn.
Chris Han, VP and head of Digital Realty in South Korea, said the country is gaining attention as one of the rapidly growing AI markets in the Asia-Pacific region.
