NHN Cloud aims to lead AI infrastructure market

[Courtesy of NHN]

NHN Cloud Corp., a cloud computing service provider in South Korea, announced its intention to proactively target the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure market by using the AI data center it opened in Gwangju in 2023 as a base.

“Our ultimate goal is to provide an environment where anyone can easily develop AI services,” NHN Cloud Chief Executive Officer Kim Dong-hoon said during the ‘NHN Cloud 2.0 Strategy Presentation’ held at the Kim Dae Jung Convention Center in Gwangju, South Jeolla Province, during the previous week.

NHN Cloud was selected as the cloud infrastructure construction and operation contractor for the ‘AI-centered Industrial Convergence Complex Development Project’ promoted by the Ministry of Science and ICT and Gwangju Metropolitan City in 2021.

After two years of data center (DC) construction and equipment installation, it officially began operating the national AI data center in October 2023.

“We plan to focus on the public, financial, gaming, and commerce sectors in 2024,” Kim said. “We also aim to maintain our leadership in the public cloud transformation business in particular.”

The two-story national AI data center, located in Buk District, Gwangju, is owned by Gwangju City, while NHN Cloud is responsible for infrastructure construction and operation.

The national AI data center has a total computing capacity of 88.5 petaflops (PF) and a total storage capacity of 107 petabytes (PB). Petaflop is a unit of measure for the calculating speed of a computer equal to one quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

NHN Cloud‘s AI graphics processing unit (GPU) facilities, located in Gwangju, Pangyo, and Pyeongchon, have a total computing capacity of 99.5 PF. They specifically include the Nvidia H100 -based 77.3 PF, Graphcore-based 11.2 PF, and SAPEON-based 11PF.

“We have over 1,000 units of H100 GPUs, which is the largest in Korea but relatively small on a global scale,” Kim said. “Nvidia-based services are the most active at the moment, but we anticipate moving towards multi-GPU moving forward.”

More than 470 entities of Korean companies and institutions are using NHN Cloud services, including Upstage Co., TmaxAI Co., Fasoo Co., EST Co., Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), and industry-academia cooperation groups.

“NHN Cloud’s technical strength lies in its AI-specific data center design capabilities and optimization that fully uses the GPUs’ power,“ Kim said. ”We believe that we are the only data center in Korea that is aiming towards AI infrastructure design.“

When asked about the recent global AI GPU supply shortage and the possibility of business disruptions during the Q&A session, Kim said, ”GPU supply depends on who places orders first, and we are responding appropriately according to demand.“ He added that “even if new products are introduced in the future, it takes time to optimize algorithms and implement them into services. While I am not in a position to comment on other companies‘ situations, it is true that NHN Cloud has a significant amount of equipment relative to its scale.”

There was also a question about raising funds, including an initial public offering (IPO) for NHN Cloud.

“We have no specific plans to go public at the moment, and plan to focus on our core business for now,” Kim replied.