The Ministry of Science and ICT on Monday announced the final selection of five teams to lead South Korea’s ambitious “sovereign AI foundation model” project, aimed at building homegrown, high-performance artificial intelligence models.
The selected teams are Naver Cloud, Upstage, SK Telecom, NC AI and LG AI Research. Each will be granted the titles of “K-AI model” and “K-AI company,” the ministry said.
The final selection followed an evaluation process that assessed each consortium’s technological capabilities, development experience, strategic clarity and the anticipated impact of their proposed models. The review also considered their commitment to open-source principles and broader industry contribution.
“All five teams have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in AI model development,” an ICT ministry official said. “They share a clear commitment to the vision of sovereign AI and presented robust open-source strategies that will allow other businesses to adopt and commercialize their technologies.”
Notably, the ministry commended the teams’ ambitions to go beyond large language models and evolve into multimodal and omnimodel architectures, reflecting a bold, scalable vision aligned with global AI advancements.
The sovereign AI project attracted proposals from 15 consortia, comprising domestic AI firms and research institutions. The initiative aims to develop AI models that achieve at least 95 percent of the performance of the most advanced international models released within the last six months.
To support the development, the government will provide each selected team with access to jointly purchased and processed datasets worth 10 billion won ($7.2 million), beginning in September.
Additionally, each team will receive 2.8 billion won in supplementary funding to build and refine domain-specific datasets tailored to their development goals. A separate pool of high-quality broadcasting and video learning data, valued at 20 billion won, will also be available.
Upstage, which has expressed interest in bolstering its global talent pool, will receive matching support from the government to cover personnel and research expenses for international researchers it seeks to recruit.
SK Telecom and Naver Cloud have been selected as graphics processing unit infrastructure providers for the project. They will lease GPU resources from the second half of this year through early 2026, with GPU support allocated to Upstage, NC AI and LG AI Research.
The ministry plans to sign formal agreements with the five groups early this month and to begin comprehensive support ― ranging from GPU and data access to global talent acquisition ― to fast-track the development of globally competitive AI foundation models.
A first-round evaluation will be conducted in December, narrowing the pool from five teams to four. Successive assessments will be conducted every six months, with only two left remaining by 2027.
“The bold initiative marks the beginning of Korea’s journey toward building AI for all,” said ICT Minister Bae Kyung-hoon. “The government will stand firmly behind our AI companies and institutions as they scale new heights and shape a robust sovereign AI ecosystem.”
yeeun@heraldcorp.com
