Lee Gyu-lee is a business writer at The Korea Times, focusing primarily on IT & telecommunications, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and KOTRA. Prior to this, she has covered a wide range of cultural news, from film, television and K-pop to lifestyle and fashion.
AI model rivalry expands into defense sector
Naver Cloud Executive Director Yu Kyung-bum speaks during the company's seminar on sovereign artificial intelligence-based defense advancement in Daejeon, Wednesday. Courtesy of Naver Cloud
By Lee Gyu-lee
Naver, NC AI target sovereign military market
Artificial intelligence (AI) competition is expanding into the defense sector as domestic tech firms pivot to military applications, leveraging proprietary models and infrastructure in a market where security and data sovereignty are paramount.
The shift comes as Naver Cloud and NC AI move beyond the government-led foundation model competition to target a fast-forming defense AI market.
Naver Cloud held a seminar on Wednesday and unveiled its strategy for sovereign AI-based defense AI transformation (AX) advancement, outlining practical pathways to deploy AI in real-world military operations.
The move follows the company’s launch earlier this month of a dedicated task force for defense AI adoption, marking its first standalone organization focused exclusively on military applications. The team, under company CEO Kim Yu-won, brings together business development, strategy, engineering and deployment personnel to accelerate military AI projects.
The company is positioning itself as more than a model provider, aiming instead to build a full-stack Korean defense AI platform.
By combining its HyperCLOVA X large language model, omnimodal AI capabilities and proprietary cloud and data center infrastructure, Naver plans to integrate and analyze military data across domains to support command decision-making.
“HyperCLOVA X OMNI can understand diverse battlefield data as a single integrated picture and use a world model to anticipate changes in the environment, converting that into intelligence that commanders can act on,” Naver Cloud Executive Director Yu Kyung-bum said during the seminar in Daejeon.
Naver said it aims to link central military data centers with modular and edge data center infrastructure that can be deployed to frontline bases, ships and mobile command posts, so AI systems can continue running even when network connections are disrupted.
The company introduced forward deployed engineers, embedded specialists who support system implementation directly in the field, as a key component of its defense strategy. The approach mirrors that of U.S. defense AI company Palantir Technologies, which built its business around close collaboration with military and intelligence agencies.
NC AI will participate in the Agency for Defense Development’s national project to develop a physical artificial intelligence-based simulator. Courtesy of NC AI
Meanwhile, NC AI is pursuing a different path focused on physical AI and robotics. The company was recently selected, alongside Hyundai Rotem, as the final contractor for the Agency for Defense Development’s national research and development project.
The initiative aims to develop a physical AI-based simulator and modular robotic system for future battlefields, using a digital twin to coordinate multiple unmanned systems and reduce the simulation-to-reality gap between virtual training and real-world deployment.
Under the project, NC AI will lead development of a world model, a core component of robot foundation models that enables machines to simulate physical environments and adapt to real-world variables.
In March, the company unveiled a lightweight world model that achieved success rates close to Nvidia’s Cosmos on 18 core tasks while using only about one quarter of the graphics processing units required by the top-performing global models.