South Korea — Sovereign AI

SK Telecom unveils A.X K1, Korea's first 500B-scale sovereign AI model with 519 billion parameters. Developed by 8-org consortium (SKT, Krafton, 42dot, Rebellions, Liner, SelectStar, Seoul National University, KAIST). Trained on 1,000 GPUs with 10 trillion data points. Mixture-of-experts architecture activates 33B of 519B parameters per task. Korean tokenizer reduces token consumption 33% vs foreign models. Functions as 'Teacher Model' for knowledge transfer to smaller domestic models. Part of Korean government's Sovereign AI Foundation Model project. Will be released as open source.

LG AI Research released EXAONE 4.5, a next-generation multimodal AI model. K-EXAONE (the government-backed sovereign variant) moved from benchmarking to deployment phase: Elice joined the LG consortium to provide stable API access via portable modular data centers (PMDC). LG and KETI launched an EXAONE-based AI Safety Report System capable of processing 10M+ reports/year, entering pilot this year.

Rebellions announced collaboration with SK Telecom and Arm to develop AI server combining Arm AGI CPU with Rebellions AI chips. Plans to run SKT's A.X K1 (519B params) on these servers. Targets sovereign AI and telecom-specific AI data centers.

South Korea committed $5.7 billion from its National Growth Fund to strengthen domestic AI capabilities, positioning Seoul alongside the US and EU in the technological-sovereignty race. The allocation follows the February 2026 national AI strategy, which identified dependence on foreign technology platforms as a strategic vulnerability.