KakaoBank Goes All-In on AI for Next-Gen Banking

Leading South Korean mobile bank, KakaoBank has established an artificial intelligence (AI) lab at the Seoul facility of data center solutions provider Digital Realty.

The strategic investment is located at Digital Realty's ICN10 data center to empower KakaoBank to accelerate its AI-powered service enhancements, develop personalized content, and fuel research and development for new financial services.

KakoBank said it had selected the center for its ability to deliver a dedicated, high-performance, and resilient environment with optimized cooling, layout, and connectivity options to support highly effective AI deployments.

Digital Realty’s modular and flexible data center design enables KakaoBank to quickly deploy its AI solution at ICN10, with room to scale as needs evolve.

ICN10's central location in Seoul's Digital Media City, coupled with its network-neutral environment, offers KakaoBank an edge by minimizing latency and providing many connectivity options to existing data centers of domestic financial institutions across the country.

Hyun-chul Ahn, chief research and development officer at KakaoBank, said the bank planned to “accelerate various AI-based businesses and research requiring complex operations, such as generative AI and language models, to gain more customers and continue to grow by enhancing our technological capabilities.”

ICN10 is equipped with high-density colocation services that can support up to 70 kilowatts (kW) per rack to address the demands of compute-intensive workloads. The data center utilizes innovative Air-Assisted Liquid Cooling (AALC) technologies, ensuring efficient heat dissipation and reliable support for the industry's highest-performance graphics processing unit (GPU) servers.

Advanced AI workloads, such as generative AI, demand precision-engineered power and cooling infrastructure capable of supporting high-power computing needs.

Chris Han, vice president and head of Korea for Digital Realty, said: "Korea is gaining attention as one of the rapidly growing AI markets in the Asia Pacific. Digital Realty has extensive experience as an enabler for global AI enterprises. With this experience, we will spare no effort to support KakaoBank's AI innovation in the financial sector.”

Image credit: iStockphoto/mesh cube