The Ministry of Science and ICT held the groundbreaking ceremony on Monday at the Solaseado data center park in Haenam, South Jeolla Province, marking the formal start of construction on a facility that will draw about 2.5 trillion won ($1.74 billion) in investment through 2028.
The center will house 15,000 graphics processing units by 2028 to train and research large-scale AI models, the ministry said, positioning the site as a national hub for the scarce chips that underpin advanced AI development.
Bae described the center as a "token factory" that would export a token-based economy to the world.
A consortium led by Samsung SDS, the sole bidder in a public tender held last autumn, was selected to build and run the complex, with partners including Naver Cloud, Kakao, KT and Samsung Electronics.
The group launched a public-private joint venture, Korea AI Computing Center, in June to oversee operations.
Samsung SDS said the facility would support the full arc of AI development, from building industry-specific models to large-scale training and inference, and pledged discounted access for startups, smaller firms and academic researchers.
How much of the computing capacity will be reserved for public-sector users has not yet been decided.
The government aims to complete the center by 2028, though the consortium plans to bring some computing resources online as early as 2027 using an existing Samsung SDS data center to meet early demand from industry and academia.
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