Baek Byung-yeul is a journalist at The Korea Times focused on cultural content, including films and cultural events in South Korea. You can contact him at baekby@koreatimes.co.kr to share your insights.
AWS enables Korean firms to achieve sustainable growth, save costs
Ham Kee-ho, country managing director of AWS Korea, speaks during the AWS Summit Seoul event at COEX in Seoul, Thursday. Korea Times photo by Baek Byung-yeul
By Baek Byung-yeul
Cloud computing has been regarded as essential tool for many companies looking to digitalize, but at a time when generative AI and sustainable growth are emerging, the cloud industry is becoming more about how it enables sustainable growth and cost savings for its customers, the head of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Korean unit said Thursday.
"AWS has consistently supported our customers' digital transformation, but recently, new topics such as generative AI and sustainable growth have emerged," Ham Kee-ho, country managing director of AWS Korea, said during a keynote speech at the AWS Summit Seoul event. "The cloud industry here is preparing for a new decade beyond its 10-year history, and we are at a critical tipping point in terms of sustainability and cost reduction."
The chief of the Korean unit emphasized the realization of carbon reduction through eco-friendly cloud infrastructure to help its customers achieve sustainable growth.
"Using AWS' low-power processor Graviton can significantly reduce carbon emissions with its high energy efficiency. Our customers here are actively adopting Graviton, making Korea the second-largest user of Graviton instances in the Asia-Pacific region," he said.
The country managing director also mentioned that generative AI has made cost optimization possible for customers.
"The number of customers who have introduced or are considering introducing AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia chips in the generative AI sector is increasing rapidly. This allows for simultaneous GPU optimization and cost savings," he said. AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia are AI chips developed by AWS for training and inference, respectively.
He shared customer cases related to generative AI innovation. NCSOFT launched its large language model VARCO for the first time among Korean game companies last year. The company developed the model using Amazon SageMaker JumpStart provided by AWS. LG AI Research also used SageMaker to build EXAONE super-large multimodal AI, enhancing AI accessibility across various industries.
Chung Suk-geun, chief AI global officer at SK Telecom, speaks during the AWS Summit Seoul event at the COEX convention center in Seoul, Thursday. Courtesy of AWS Korea
AWS's domestic partners also shared how they were able to achieve work efficiency by using AWS services.
Chung Suk-geun, chief AI global officer at SK Telecom, announced plans to actively supply the company's telecom AI to customers of AWS, a leading cloud service provider in the telecommunications sector.
"As AWS is the No. 1 cloud provider in the telecommunications sector, we look forward to expanding our technology and platform through AWS' customers."
SK Telecom is developing a telecom LLM, a large language model that can be used by telecommunications companies domestically and internationally for services such as customer consultations and real-time interpretation, in collaboration with tech companies such as AWS and Anthropic.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the AWS Summit Seoul has garnered over 100,000 visitors so far, with more than 90 percent returning for subsequent events. Particularly, this year’s summit is expected to attract more than 20,000 attendees over two days.
During the event, AWS will offer over 100 lectures on various industry sectors and technical topics centered on generative AI, and more than 70 customers are expected to share their experiences using AWS services.