KakaoBank Powers AI Innovation at Digital Realty’s ICN10 Data Center

Dedicated artificial intelligence (AI) lab to support KakaoBank’s fintech research and development for secure, convenient consumer mobile banking services

Digital Realty the largest 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, leveraging Digital Realty’s data center infrastructure and expertise, will empower KakaoBank to accelerate its AI-powered service enhancements, develop personalized content, and fuel research and development for new financial services.

CIO INFLUENCE ARTICLE : 10 Data Center Trends to Watch in 2024

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.

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

Reliability is paramount in the financial services industry, where sudden disruptions in functionality can lead to critical breaks in customer trust. Digital Realty’s ICN10 data center features an N+1 designed redundant electrical and mechanical infrastructure to ensure seamless, uninterrupted operation. Digital Realty has been awarded Uptime Institute’s Tier 3 rating for maintenance without interruption and as of 2023, has achieved 16 consecutive years of five-nines high availability.

CIO INFLUENCE : Top Challenges for CTOs in 2023

Data is critical for AI applications, which are turbocharged when they can extract insights across data sets. PlatformDIGITAL, Digital Realty’s global data center platform, supports private cloud consumption by enabling secure and highly performant access to data sets across an enterprise’s ecosystem with ServiceFabric, Digital Realty’s global service orchestration platform. Furthermore, ICN10’s dedicated access to AWS Direct Connect 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.

ICN10’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.”