The True Form of ‘Gak Sejong’ Begins Operation at a World-Class Scale

‘Gak Sejong’ is taking shape and beginning operations on a world-class scale.

Sejong City recently held an opening ceremony for ‘Gak Sejong’ in the Jiphyeon-dong area, attended by Choi Min-ho, Mayor of Sejong, Choi Soo-yeon, CEO of Naver Corporation, and Kim Yoo-won, CEO of Naver Cloud Corporation, the city announced on the 8th.

Attendees are taking a commemorative photo at the opening ceremony of 'Gak Sejong' held recently in Jiphyeon-dong, Sejong City. Photo by Naver

‘Gak Sejong’ is Naver’s second data center in South Korea, following the one in Chuncheon.

Naver plans to build ‘Gak Sejong’ in two phases, and the recently opened facility is the Phase 1 data center. The Phase 1 data center consists of four buildings?server building, operations building, dormitory building, and information building?spanning three basement levels and four above-ground floors.

‘Gak Sejong’ is built to withstand earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 and can accommodate up to 600,000 servers.

More importantly, ‘Gak Sejong’ goes beyond a simple data storage facility; it is designed as a future-oriented hyperscale data center that integrates Naver’s technological capabilities in 5G networks, robotics, artificial intelligence, and big data.

Previously, Sejong City was selected as the final site in the nationwide ‘Naver 2nd Data Center Location Competition’ in 2019, successfully attracting ‘Gak Sejong’ to the region.

Following this, the city completed industrial complex entry and sales contracts, site development, architectural review, and permits in 2020, began construction of ‘Gak Sejong’ in 2021, and finished the project in two and a half years. The facility received its usage approval in August.

With ‘Gak Sejong’ now fully operational, Sejong City expects economic benefits such as increased local tax revenue and job creation.

In particular, the local taxes paid by Naver for building and operating ‘Gak Sejong’ are anticipated to positively impact Sejong City’s fiscal soundness. The scale of local taxes paid by Naver is expected to be the largest among single companies in the Sejong area.

Separately, Sejong City plans to use ‘Gak Sejong’ as a link to discover and promote collaborative projects with Naver in the region.

A Sejong City official said, “We expect Naver to play a strong partner role in Sejong’s growth as a leading smart technology city. Sejong City will continue efforts to support ‘Gak Sejong’ and Naver’s leap forward in the region, while discovering and implementing cooperative projects for mutual growth between the local community and businesses.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.