AI use cases in South Korea
4 documented implementations
NOL UNIVERSE builds unified data lakehouse with Databricks, cutting batch computing costs by 77%
NOL UNIVERSE
NOL UNIVERSE, a Korean travel, leisure, and culture platform operating the NOL, NOL Interpark Tours, and NOL Tickets brands, migrated approximately 2,500 Hive-based queries and its Apache Airflow/NiFi pipelines to the Databricks Platform, consolidating disparate BI tools into a single environment and giving each business domain a self-service analytics environment governed by Unity Catalog. The customer service team also used Databricks machine learning to automate categorization of CS consultation history. The migration was completed in two months, reducing time to complete batch aggregation by 66%, decreasing batch computing costs by 77%, and increasing data availability time by 27%.
KT Corporation and Microsoft launch five-year multibillion-dollar AI partnership in Korea
KT Corporation
KT Corporation and Microsoft announced a five-year, multibillion-dollar strategic partnership to drive AI transformation for more than 650,000 businesses and 17 million consumers in Korea. The plan includes a Korea-customized GPT-4o via Azure OpenAI Service, a Korean sovereign cloud (Secure Public Cloud) built on Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, a new AX-specialized service company, an AI co-innovation center with Microsoft Research, and deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot to KT employees, with more than 19,000 employees to be trained in cloud and AI skills.
Hyundai Motor Group builds NVIDIA Blackwell AI factory for mobility and smart factories
Hyundai Motor Group
Hyundai Motor Group is building an AI factory using 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to train, validate and deploy AI for in-vehicle systems, autonomous driving, smart factories and robotics. The collaboration includes an approximately $3 billion investment with the Korean government to build a national physical AI cluster, an NVIDIA AI Technology Center and Hyundai's Physical AI Application Center. Hyundai is exploring using NVIDIA Omniverse and Cosmos on RTX PRO Servers for factory digital twins, and using NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor running DriveOS for driver-assistance and in-vehicle AI.
TMAP Mobility Powers Smarter, Safer Travel
TMAP Mobility
TMAP Mobility, Korea's leading mobile navigation service with over 25 million subscribers and adoption in more than 95% of domestic vehicles, adopted the Databricks Platform to address data access and governance roadblocks that stalled AI-driven personalization efforts. Using Genie Space, non-data specialists can now explore and analyze data with natural language, and Unity Catalog provides granular permission management and column masking. As of September 2025, the analytics team receives 68% fewer simple data extraction requests, and approximately 48% of all employees can directly explore and utilize data. TMAP processes more than 7.3 billion mobility data points annually and used the Recommendation Engines Solution Accelerator to prototype and deploy scalable recommendation models faster.