Artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud software leading corporations Okestro Group said on the 22nd it was selected as the lead corporation of the Cheonan-Asan consortium that will carry out the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport's "AI-specialized pilot city project."
The "AI-specialized pilot city project" is a national core initiative to build pilot cities equipped with AI infrastructure, urban data, and regulatory sandboxes to demonstrate AI technologies and services in real urban spaces across areas such as transportation and safety. The government selected two sites through an open call: one in the Chungcheong region and one in the Gangwon region.
Among them, the Cheonan-Asan project will be pursued over five years through 2030 with a total budget of about 610.9 billion won.
Okestro will establish an integrated operations and management system for a sovereign AI cloud data center, the core foundation of this project. The goal is to efficiently operate AI computing resources based on domestically produced graphics processing units (GPUs) and Neural Processing Units (NPUs), and to lay the groundwork for infrastructure operations that the public and private sectors can use reliably.
The Cheonan-Asan consortium, with Okestro as the lead corporation, includes 11 industry-academia-research-government institutions such as ▲ Upstage ▲ Nota ▲ Clobot ▲ KEPCO KDN Co. (KDN) ▲ KAIST Mobility AX Research Institute ▲ Chungnam Content Agency. The consortium spans the full value chain needed to realize an AI city—from AI infrastructure to foundation models, Edge AI, urban data, Digital Twin, physical AI, energy, and mobility.
Starting this year, the consortium plans to pilot citizen-facing AI services in stages, including proactive integrated disaster management, traffic flow optimization, intelligent integrated energy management, and AI-based civil complaint response. An Okestro official said, "Through this, Cheonan and Asan are expected to implement a pan-regional AI city operations model that identifies and addresses urban problems on a single platform across the 1,178-square-kilometer shared living area of the two cities."
Kim Min-jun, chair of Okestro Group, said, "We will focus all our capabilities so that Cheonan and Asan can establish themselves as a leading K-AI City model representing Korea, based on sovereign AI cloud and data center integrated operations and management technologies."