October 24, 2025
In a significant strategic pivot, South Korean gaming giant KRAFTON, the creator of the global phenomenon *PUBG*, has announced a commitment of approximately 100 billion Korean Won ($73 million) to establish a high-performance GPU cluster. This substantial investment marks the company's formal transition to an "AI-First" enterprise and represents a major private-sector push to build sovereign AI infrastructure within Korea.
The announcement was made on October 23 during an internal company forum, KRAFTON Live Talk, themed around the "Transition to an AI-First Company."
Empowering a Workforce and Streamlining Production
According to the company, the new GPU cluster will serve as the foundational infrastructure for developing large-scale "agentic AI" systems. These advanced AI models are capable of complex reasoning, multi-step task planning, and autonomous decision-making. KRAFTON's strategy pairs this infrastructure investment with a comprehensive workforce education program, earmarking roughly 30 billion Won annually starting in 2026 to help employees adopt and apply AI tools across all departments.
The initiative aims to modernize internal workflows, accelerate game development, and enhance in-game services. By automating routine operational tasks, the company intends to free up its workforce to focus on creative problem-solving and innovation-driven roles, signaling a fundamental shift in its operational paradigm.
Building Korea's Next-Generation AI Competitiveness
The 100 billion Won investment will underpin a multi-stage AI architecture designed to handle high-precision inference and iterative processes essential for advanced AI models. KRAFTON expects to complete an integrated AI platform and data automation system by the second half of 2026. This platform will include an enterprise-wide AI operation framework, data standardization architecture, an agentic AI management platform, and automated workflow integration.
This move aligns with South Korea's national agenda to strengthen its AI-content and digital innovation sectors, a key pillar of the country's broader "K-tech" growth strategy.
A Long-Term Vision for an AI-Driven Future
Kim Chang-han, CEO of KRAFTON, emphasized that the "AI-First" strategy extends far beyond gaming. It reflects a long-term vision to position the company at the forefront of AI research, entertainment, and enterprise productivity.
"From today onward, KRAFTON will automate work around agentic AI, allowing employees to focus on creative and complex problem-solving," stated Kim. "Through AI, we will foster individual growth, expand organizational challenges, and set operational standards that can serve as a global reference for the game industry."
Catalyzing a Broader National Transformation
KRAFTON's shift mirrors Korea's larger national movements in AI Transformation (AX) and Digital Transformation (DX), where both government and industry are collaborating to build an AI-powered economy. The company's GPU cluster initiative dovetails with efforts led by the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) and KOCCA, which emphasize AI-content convergence and next-generation computing.
This private-sector investment is poised to expand Korea's overall AI competitiveness by establishing a robust data and computing foundation that startups, researchers, and other tech firms can potentially leverage. The cluster may evolve into a collaborative platform, supporting ventures in AI automation, content generation, and agentic computing.
For international observers, KRAFTON's strategy demonstrates how Korea's tech sector is moving toward greater sovereign AI capacity and digital self-reliance, marking a key milestone in the nation's ambition to become a leading AI innovation hub in the Asia-Pacific region.
SOURCE koreatechdesk
