South Korea\'s government said it will accelerate a mega project, with 353 trillion won in investments set to begin this year through construction starts or facility expansions. President Lee Jae-myung called for parallel procedures, shorter timelines and regulatory improvements, and ordered steps to enable early use of the Gwangju military airport site as a semiconductor industrial complex. The plan also detailed power and water supply schedules and expanded support measures for robots, parts suppliers and smaller firms.

SK Telecom is targeting the industrial AI market with its proprietary foundation model A.X K2, which it says has evolved into a “working AI” that understands long context and uses external tools to carry out tasks. The company says the model has 688 billion parameters and shows improved performance across benchmarks, while keeping active parameters at 33 billion during inference to control computing costs. SKT is also developing multimodal and security-focused deployments and will release weights and inference code under an Apache 2.0 licence.