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Tag: daejeon

  • South Korea Launches $276 Million Hangang Supercomputer

    South Korea Launches $276 Million Hangang Supercomputer

    South Korea unveiled its sixth national supercomputer, Hangang, on November 2, launching a 382.5-billion-won ($276 million) infrastructure installation designed to advance artificial intelligence and scientific research.

    The Ministry of Science and ICT partnered with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) to host the launch ceremony at KISTI headquarters in Daejeon, bringing together approximately 200 representatives from industry, academia, and government research bodies.

    KISTI President Lee Sik oversees the system, which pairs 8,496 graphics processing units, including NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, with 9,936 central processing units to hit a theoretical peak speed of 614.7 petaflops, or 614.7 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

    Computing Power Expands for Industrial Simulation

    Hangang replaces Nurion, the country’s fifth national supercomputer that handled public computing tasks after entering service in 2018. Compared to the older machine, the new platform delivers 24 times the theoretical computing speed, 10 times the storage capacity, and four times the network transfer performance.

    State planners designed the infrastructure to process high-intensity artificial intelligence workloads alongside commercial engineering simulations. Key industrial applications include digital vehicle crash testing and real-time meteorological forecasting, targeting design cycles where physical prototyping slows time to market.

    State Backing for Enterprise AI Models

    Computing bottlenecks have tightened across East Asia as commercial enterprises and university laboratories compete for high-end processing hardware. Hangang pools specialized processing power into a state-subsidized platform, lowering entry barriers for domestic technology firms training large models against regional rivals.

    The risk sits in resource allocation. Sovereign compute networks frequently face friction between academic basic research and commercial deployment, with capacity quotas often favoring state-led agendas over fast-moving enterprise applications. Hangang will direct substantial capacity toward K-Moonshot, a government-directed program deploying advanced artificial intelligence models to resolve scientific targets.

    Replacing Nurion After Six Years of Service

    The retirement of Nurion follows a six-year operational cycle during which global artificial intelligence training shifted from conventional central processing units to dense graphics processing clusters. Nurion lacked the unified memory architectures and specialized tensor cores required for modern transformer models, leaving South Korean institutions reliant on foreign commercial cloud vendors for heavy AI development.

    Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information President Lee Sik said: “We will do our utmost to ensure stable operations and top-tier user support, using KISTI’s long-standing operational experience in supercomputing.”

    Next Steps for National Deployment

    Engineers began pilot testing on the cluster in late October to calibrate thermal controls and network distribution across the 8,496 graphics processors. KISTI plans to begin full commercial and research operations on December 16.

  • M&G makes first retail acquisition in South Korea

    M&G makes first retail acquisition in South Korea

    M&G Real Estate has acquired three retail assets in South Korea at a combined value of US$230 million, representing an average yield of 6.5%. The acquisition was made on behalf of its core Asia real estate strategy, managed by Singapore-based Erle Spratt.

    Under the terms of the deal, M&G Real Estate has acquired two hypermarkets: the first in Daejeon, South Korea’s fifth largest city; the second in Jeju, the capital of the Jeju Province and the nation’s premier tourist destination. The third asset is an outlet mall in Incheon City, the country’s third largest city after Seoul and Busan. All three assets are highly sought after retail outlets in prime locations and are leased to South Korea’s largest retailer, Lotte Shopping.

    Hyesik Ryu, Managing Director, M&G Real Estate Korea, comments: “We were one of the first non-domestic institutional investors to invest in South Korea when we bought into the country’s commercial office sector in 2004. M&G Real Estate has developed a deep understanding of the market, enabling us to make this latest investment in the retail sector, which will strengthen the strategy’s long term income stream.”

    Erle Spratt adds: “We’re seeing strong capital flows, particularly from global pension funds and insurance companies in the UK and Europe. With responsibility for more than US$2 billion in assets, we are well positioned to pursue property investments across the region to further improve our risk adjusted returns and sustain the outperformance of our portfolio.”

    Stefan Cornelissen, M&G’s head of institutional business, Benelux, Nordics and Switzerland, says: “The Asia Pacific real estate market is now the second largest in the world and rivals the US and Europe in terms of its maturity, transparency and liquidity. European investors in search of diversification can now benefit from Asia’s strong economic growth and attractive long term returns without going higher up the risk curve.

    “We have recently had a significant commitment from Dutch investor, Blue Sky Group, which has invested on behalf of its recently launched Core Asia Pacific Fund. We expect further capital to follow from other UK and European investors. Asian real estate has come of age and is earning itself a strategic place in a diversified core real estate portfolio.”

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