KakaoBank powers AI innovation at Digital Realty’s data centre

KakaoBank has established an artificial intelligence (AI) lab at Digital Realty’s ICN10 data centre in Seoul. The mobile bank in South Korea chose Digital Realty for its ability to deliver a dedicated, high-performance, and resilient environment with optimised 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. It utilises Air-Assisted Liquid Cooling technologies too, ensuring efficient heat dissipation and reliable support for the highest-performance graphics processing unit servers in the industry.

Given Digital Realty’s modular and flexible data centre design, KakaoBank could quickly deploy its AI solution at ICN10, with room to scale as its needs evolve.

Digital Realty’s ICN10 data centre also features an N+1-designed redundant electrical and mechanical infrastructure to ensure seamless, uninterrupted operation. This is key as sudden disruptions in the delivery of financial services can lead to critical breaks in customer trust.

KakaoBank is also using Digital Realty’s PlatformDIGITAL (a global data centre platform) and ServiceFabric (a global service orchestration platform) to enable secure and highly performant access to data sets across an enterprise’s ecosystem. Additionally, the mobile bank leverages ICN10’s dedicated access to AWS Direct Connect to connect its private cloud infrastructure to the AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region, providing a low-latency, high-performance, secure, and cost-effective connectivity solution.

Hyun-chul Ahn, chief research and development Officer of KakaoBank, says: “Through the opening of the AI centre, 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.”