Naver opens Asia’s largest data center for AI, cloud biz

SEJONG – South Korea’s online giant Naver Corp. opened Asia’s largest data center in the country to lead technology innovation and accelerate its future growth engine focusing on artificial intelligence and cloud sectors.

Naver on Wednesday unveiled the center in Sejong, the country’s administrative city about 150 kilometers (93 miles) south of Seoul, which is equipped with the company’s capabilities on high-tech including AI, cloud, robot and self-driving.

“This is a data center we designed based on future visions for the next 10 years or more,” Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon said at an opening ceremony. “It will become a technology innovation engine of not only Naver but also all industries.”

The center built on a land of 294,000 square meters has infrastructure for up to 600,000 rack units for servers, enough to store 65 exabytes of data, bout 1 million times of all data held by the National Library of Korea, according to Naver.

The facility called GAK Sejong is Naver’s second data center. The tech behemoth has been operating another one with 100,000 rack units since 2013 in Chuncheon about 100 km east of Seoul.

TO EXPAND AI, CLOUD BUSINESSES TO OTHER INDUSTRIES, COUNTRIES

Naver is set to operate only one-sixth of the new center at the initial stage. The company plans to expand the operation depending on technology development and data increase in six stages with schedules to start the second phase in 2025 and the third in 2016.

“Naver is operating the largest GPUs optimized for high computational processing in South Korea and it is the only company in the country that established clusters of supercomputers on a large scale,” said Kim Yoo-won, CEO of Naver Cloud, a subsidiary of Naver.

“Naver’s AI and cloud businesses, which started a new phase with the recent launch of HyperCLOVA X, are expected to accelerate their expansions into various industries and countries with the opening of GAK Sejong today,” Kim said, referring to Naver’s hyperscale AI platform.

The company aims to advance the technology of data centers, core facilities for generative AI, which requires process large size of data.

It is in talks with Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s top memory chipmaker, on the development of its own neural processing unit (NPU), a kind of AI chip, to reduce GPU costs.

ROBOTS

Naver applied advanced technologies such as AI, robots, autonomous driving and digital twins to maximize the efficiency of the center’s operation and management.

The company runs two types of robots based on its own robot automation system – one for managing servers, a key asset of data center IT warehouses, and the other for moving heavy items between server rooms and warehouses. Those robots cut hours to complete tasks by 30-50%, according to the company

All robots provide various services based on real-time connection with space and service infrastructures through an AI-robot cloud and an adaptive robot management system built on the Naver Cloud platform.

Naver also operates autonomous driving six-seater shuttles for employees and visitors in the center for their transportation.

“Clients from various countries and industries showed strong interest not only in Naver’s AI technology but also in the size and operation capabilities of data centers, given the growing attention to sovereign AI and sovereign cloud,” said Kim.

“GAK Sejong is predicted to become the outpost of AI and cloud businesses, which aim to expand into various sectors.”

Non-English-speaking countries have begun seeking to develop their own AI technologies to protect their digital sovereignty from Big Tech companies in English-speaking nations such as the US.

Naver, which has been operating the center in Chuncheon without any accident or outage for a decade, prepared systems at the new facility to maintain service even in the event of disasters such as fires and earthquakes.

Its rival Kakao Corp., South Korea’s mobile platform giant, suffered service disruptions in October 2022 when a fire hit a data center it rented.

Write to Ji-Eun Jeong at jeong@hankyung.com
 
Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.