The Naver Cloud Consortium has been selected as the final implementing institutional investor for the government's project to develop a 'cybersecurity-specialized AI (artificial intelligence) foundation model.' It secured the contract after a two-way competition against the SK Telecom consortium.
On the 3rd, the Ministry of Science and ICT announced that it had selected the Naver Cloud Consortium as the final implementing institutional investor following evaluation presentations for the two consortia that participated in the project bidding.
The goal of this project is to develop an AI foundation model specialized for Korea's cybersecurity environment and apply it in actual security operations. The government plans to support large-scale AI computing resources and release the development results as open source to spread them across the entire domestic security AI ecosystem.
The Naver Cloud Consortium received high praise for forming a large-scale university-industry-government alliance with technical expertise and development experience in the fields of AI and security. Its development strategy and goals, which include building 'Harness'—a system where multiple AI agents divide roles to perform security tasks and organically connect and manage them—were also well-received.
The evaluation was conducted by external experts in the fields of AI and cybersecurity. Based on project proposals and presentation content, the experts comprehensively assessed technical capabilities, development experience, excellence and feasibility of development strategies and technologies, market potential, and ripple effects.
The Naver Cloud Consortium formed a large-scale university-industry-government alliance with the goal of 'developing an AI foundation model to internalize national cybersecurity capabilities.' Participating entities include LG Group affiliates such as LG CNS (LG C&S), LG AI Research Institute, and LG Uplus; iTrust Security, Trillion Labs, Theory Korea, HyperXcel; and other AI and security companies. Also involved are Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI), Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, the Financial Security Institute, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), Seoul National University, KAIST, and Pohang University of Science and Technology.
Naver Cloud and LG CNS plan to develop an AI model optimized for Korea's security environment based on their own technologies covering everything from AI models to infrastructure, security, and data. Their respective experiences in developing AI models such as Naver Cloud's 'HyperCLOVA X' and LG AI Research Institute's 'ExaOne' have been combined.
The competing SK Telecom consortium included 13 institutional investors: Upstage, SK Shieldus, SecuAI, AhnLab, Glue Corporation, Raon Secure, Genie, Pionlink, and others. Although it showcased capabilities spanning AI model development to security services, it did not secure the final selection.
The government will support a total of 256 NVIDIA B200 GPUs (graphics processing units) to the Naver Cloud Consortium over 10 months starting this month. Support will be provided for the first five months, and the remaining five months of support will continue based on the results of an interim evaluation.
The Ministry of Science and ICT plans to sign an agreement with the Naver Cloud Consortium later this month and begin developing cybersecurity-specialized AI models alongside GPU support. A consortium working group will also be established immediately to monitor project progress and support performance creation.
in TECH
