According to TechCrunch, South Korea has launched its ambitious sovereign AI (artificial intelligence) initiative, committing to pouring $390 million into five local companies to build large-scale models and platforms.
This move highlights South Korea's desire to reduce its dependence on foreign AI technology, in the hope of strengthening national security and tightening data control in the AI era.
Organizations selected by the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology to participate in the major plan are LG AI Research, SK Telecom, Naver Cloud, NC AI and startup Upstage.
Every six months, the Korean government will review the progress of each unit, cut ineffective groups and continue to sponsor pioneering groups until there are only two groups left to lead the country's sovereign AI strategy.
LG AI Research, a research and development unit of the Korean giant LG Group, provides Exaone 4.0, a reasoning AI model. The latest version combined with wide language processing with advanced theoretical features was first introduced in the company's previous Exaone Deep model. Exaone 4.0 (32B) has now scored quite well compared to competitors on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index scale (same as Upstage's Solar Pro2).
However, the company plans to improve and enhance its rankings through in-depth access to industry-based data, from biotechnology to advanced materials and manufacturing.
Korea telecommunications giant SK Telecom (SKT) launched its latest major language model, called AX, in July 2025. Based on China's open source model from Alibaba Cloud, Qwen 2.5, the AX 4.0, with two versions, including one with up to 72 billion parameters.
SK said that AX 4.0 processes Korean input data about 33% more effectively than GPT-4o, emphasizing its localized language advantage. (openAI's GPT 5.0 comparison data is not yet available). SKT also sourced its AX 3.1 models earlier this summer.
As for Naver Cloud, a cloud service branch of leading Korean Internet company Naver, launched its large language model hyperClova in 2021. Two years later, the company launched the upgraded version of hyperClova X, along with supporting tools such as Clova X and Cue. In 2025, Naver also launched the hyperclove X Think multi-modal AI model.
Naver stands out as the only Korean company and one of the few in the world that can truly claim to own a "full set of AI tools". A Naver spokesperson explained that the company built the hyperClova X model from scratch and operated huge data centers, cloud services, AI platforms, apps and consumer services to realize the technology.
