NHN Cloud said on Sept. 16 it signed a memorandum of understanding on Sept. 15 with the C5ISRT Convergence Research Institute under the Department of Defence Technology Management at Korea University’s Graduate School of Management of Technology. The agreement covers industry-academia cooperation in defence battlefield cloud and C5ISRT fields. The signing took place at its Play Museum headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province.

C5ISRT refers to an advanced command-and-control and battlefield awareness system. The two sides will jointly plan, propose and carry out related projects and pursue research and development in defence battlefield cloud and in AI and cloud fields.

They will also work on applying platforms to the defence sector and on research and development of C5ISRT test systems based on NHN Cloud’s cloud platform. NHN Cloud plans to support investment worth 10 billion won for related resources, technology and the provision of education.

They will also jointly pursue the establishment of degree programmes to train defence AI and cloud specialists.

NHN Cloud is currently supplying a closed private cloud environment and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) to the "Allied Korean Joint Command and Control System (AKJCCS) performance improvement system development project" used in South Korea-U.S. combined operations. It is also participating in the "hyperscale AI-based command-and-control system technology development project" that uses a defence large language model (LLM) and is at the technology negotiation stage.

The company plans to use this cooperation to build a defence-specific cloud platform and later expand its business scope to areas such as defence AI data centres.

NHN Cloud CEO Kim Dong-hoon (김동훈) said, "AI transformation in defence requires not only AI technology but also a cloud-based platform that can use it reliably, along with research and development capabilities to apply it to actual defence systems." He added, "We will broaden the foundation for business in specialised battlefield cloud platforms and in defence AX."