Digital Realty supports KakaoBank’s AI workloads and innovation in the financial sector with its data center infrastructure and expertise.

Digital Realty, a global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data center, colocation and interconnection solutions, announced that KakaoBank, a leading mobile bank in Korea, has established an artificial intelligence (AI) lab at Digital Realty’s ICN10 data center in Seoul. This strategic investment, aims for KakaoBank to accelerate its AI-powered service enhancements, develop personalized content, and fuel research and development for new financial services.

[From left to right] Sangwon Seo-KakaoBank Infra team leader, Junsik Eum-KakaoBank CIO, HyunChul Ahn-KakaoBank CRDO, JaeHong Shin-KakaoBank CTO, Chris Han-Vice President and Head of Korea, Digital Realty, Matt Berzak-Vice President, Portfolio Management, Digital Realty, SJ Lee-data center manager, Digital Realty, Jeremy Hwang-Sales Director, Korea, Digital Realty

KakaoBank selected Digital Realty’s ICN10 data 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.

“Korea is gaining attention as one of the rapidly growing AI markets in 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.”

 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 highest-performance graphics processing unit (GPU) servers in the industry.

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

The data center in question features an N+1 designed redundant electrical and mechanical infrastructure to ensure seamless, uninterrupted operation, and a Tier 3 rating by the Uptime Institute, for achieving maintenance without interruption.

On top of that, Digital Realty’s global data center platform supports private cloud consumption by enabling secure and high performance access to data sets across an enterprise’s ecosystem with its  global service orchestration platform. Digital Realty’s data center enjoys dedicated access to AWS Direct Connect which enables KakaoBank to connect their private infrastructure to AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region, providing a low-latency, high-performance, secure, and cost-effective connectivity solution.

 The data center’s central location in Seoul’s Digital Media City, coupled with its network-neutral environment, offer KakaoBank an edge by minimizing latency and providing a multitude of connectivity options to existing data centers of domestic financial institutions across the country.

 Hyun-chul Ahn, Chief Research and Development Officer of KakaoBank, said, “Through the opening of the AI center, we have created an environment to strengthen collaboration with the Kakao community, external academia, and companies. We plan 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.”

 Chris Han, Vice President, Head of Korea, Digital Realty, said, “Korea is gaining attention as one of the rapidly growing AI markets in 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.”

About Digital Realty

Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions.

(This article is adapted from a press release).