South Korea unveiled its sixth national supercomputer, Hangang, on November 2, launching a 382.5-billion-won ($276 million) infrastructure installation designed to advance artificial intelligence and scientific research.
The Ministry of Science and ICT partnered with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) to host the launch ceremony at KISTI headquarters in Daejeon, bringing together approximately 200 representatives from industry, academia, and government research bodies.
KISTI President Lee Sik oversees the system, which pairs 8,496 graphics processing units, including NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, with 9,936 central processing units to hit a theoretical peak speed of 614.7 petaflops, or 614.7 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.
Hangang replaces Nurion, the country’s fifth national supercomputer that handled public computing tasks after entering service in 2018. Compared to the older machine, the new platform delivers 24 times the theoretical computing speed, 10 times the storage capacity, and four times the network transfer performance.
State planners designed the infrastructure to process high-intensity artificial intelligence workloads alongside commercial engineering simulations. Key industrial applications include digital vehicle crash testing and real-time meteorological forecasting, targeting design cycles where physical prototyping slows time to market.
Computing bottlenecks have tightened across East Asia as commercial enterprises and university laboratories compete for high-end processing hardware. Hangang pools specialized processing power into a state-subsidized platform, lowering entry barriers for domestic technology firms training large models against regional rivals.
The risk sits in resource allocation. Sovereign compute networks frequently face friction between academic basic research and commercial deployment, with capacity quotas often favoring state-led agendas over fast-moving enterprise applications.
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