Five elite teams have been finally selected to participate in the “Independent Artificial Intelligence Foundation Model (AI Foundation Model)” project, overseen by the Ministry of Science and ICT. The teams chosen are Naver Cloud, UpStage, SK Telecom (SKT), NC AI, and the AI Research Center at the LG Management Development Institute. They will embark on developing entirely homegrown models to secure Korea’s AI technological sovereignty.

The Ministry of Science and ICT announced that, from an initial pool of 15 applicants assessed via document review and a subsequent head-to-head presentation round among 10 contenders, these five teams were compressed into the final lineup. Evaluation criteria included technical prowess, excellence of development objectives, strategy, and anticipated ripple effects.

NC AI Consortium

The NC AI consortium aims to develop a “scalable multimodal generative foundation model for industrial AI transformation.” Led by NC AI, it brings together academia—Korea University, Seoul National University, KAIST—and industry players such as POSCO DX, Lotte Innovate, MBC, and NHN. The consortium will tackle the creation of a world-class language model on the order of 200 billion parameters and a derived multimodal model. They also plan to establish a DomainOps platform to support industry-specific AI transitions across manufacturing, distribution, robotics, and content sectors.

SK Telecom Consortium

Krafton joins the SK Telecom-led consortium as a major partner. Together, they aim to realize “K-AI services” by developing a next-generation, transformer-based hyper-scale model that integrates language, multimodal, and behavioral capabilities. Krafton’s involvement is expected to surface and proliferate AI use cases across pivotal domestic industries, including gaming, manufacturing, automotive, and robotics.

All five teams are committed to a from-scratch development approach—eschewing reliance on preexisting models—and have proposed an open-source policy robust enough for commercial deployment.

The government will extend unprecedented support: each team will receive KRW 2.8 billion for data acquisition and processing; a jointly procured KRW 10 billion pool of high-quality data will be made available; and an additional KRW 20 billion in high-quality broadcast video data will be provided.

GPU computing resources will be prioritized for UpStage, NC AI, and the LG Management Development Institute AI Research Center. SK Telecom and Naver Cloud—selected as GPU leasing providers—will be excluded from this year’s GPU support allocation.

Agreements with the five elite teams will be signed in early August, marking the official project launch. A first-phase evaluation set for the end of December will narrow the field from five teams to four.

Minister Bae Kyung-hoon praised the chosen teams for their exceptional skill and enthusiasm, and vowed that the government would fully support Korean AI companies in advancing and growing the national AI ecosystem.