Artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure corporations Elice said on the 23rd it will take part in the Korea Industrial Complex Corporation (KICOX) Busan headquarters' "Busan shipbuilding and marine Edge AI data center construction project," which was selected for the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy's "2026 industrial complex edge AIDC demonstration pilot project."
The goal of this project is to build the first edge artificial intelligence (AI) data center in an industrial complex nationwide based on graphics processing units (GPUs) and domestically produced Neural Processing Unit (NPU) chips to support manufacturers' AX (AI transformation).
Elice will, for the first time, bundle its modular AI data center "Elice AI PMDC," which completed verification on its in-house AI cloud "Elice Cloud," with the AI cloud infrastructure virtualization solution "ECI" and supply them together to external customers.
In this project, Elice will build two AI PMDC units incorporating high-density power design technology and provide the ECI environment, an integrated operations platform to control them efficiently. A company official said, "Through ECI technology, which efficiently allocates and operates different AI accelerator resources such as GPUs and domestically produced NPUs, we plan to maximize the utilization of computing resources and implement a low-latency, high-efficiency AI environment optimized for manufacturing sites."
This project will be built as the nation's first industrial-complex Edge AI data center model that uses GPUs and domestically produced NPUs together. GPUs will handle training, validation, and high-performance computing for manufacturing AI models, while domestically produced NPUs will handle inference and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.
It will also establish a disaster recovery (DR) framework, including an uninterrupted power supply structure and a dualized system for security, to create an environment capable of providing stable AI services even in the event of failures.
Kim Jae-won, CEO of Elice, said, "This project is the first case of applying to industrial sites the integrated package of AI PMDC and ECI that Elice verified on its own AI cloud, and it will be an important milestone that contributes not only to the AI transformation of manufacturing but also to the expansion of the domestic AI Semiconductor ecosystem."