As global competition for AI dominance intensifies in the opening of 2026, Korea’s leading AI companies are also in motion. SK Group has decided on an astronomical investment of more than ₩100 trillion, staking the group’s future, while AI startup Upstage has brought major portal Daum under its wing. NCSoft, meanwhile, has replaced the head of its AI organization.

SK: “Qualitative Growth”… ₩103 Trillion in Ammunition Loaded

At a recently held “Management Strategy Meeting,” SK Group finalized an aggressive blueprint to invest a total of ₩103 trillion through 2028. The key point is that nearly 80% of that—about ₩82 trillion—will be concentrated on building an “AI value chain,” spanning HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), AI data centers, and personal AI assistants (PAA), among other areas.

Chairman Chey Tae-won emphasized during the meeting, “What we need is qualitative growth through AI, not simply getting bigger.” To that end, SK also unveiled a hardline financial strategy: integrating capabilities that are currently scattered across its affiliates and securing ₩80 trillion in funding internally through operational improvement (O/I). This reflects SK’s determination to build fundamental resilience that won’t be shaken by semiconductor market cycles—while never letting go of the initiative in the AI infrastructure market.

‘Upstage’ Takes Daum… “The Shift in Search Power Begins”

In the platform industry, an upset unfolded—one described as “David swallowing Goliath.” Upstage, one of Korea’s leading AI technology startups, pulled off a mega-deal to acquire Daum, Kakao’s portal service.

This acquisition signals Upstage’s ambition to expand beyond the B2B (business-to-business) market and into a B2C (business-to-consumer) platform—building on the global recognition it has earned for its in-house large language model (LLM), Solar. Industry experts predict that if Daum’s massive database—long burdened by declining market share—combines with Upstage’s generative AI technology, a formidable “catfish” could emerge in the search market dominated by Naver and Google. This is being read as more than a corporate acquisition: it is also a flare announcing a paradigm shift from traditional keyword search to “AI conversational search.”

NCSoft Makes a Leadership-Change Play… “Securing Practical Gains for Game-Production AI”

NCSoft has abruptly replaced the leadership of its AI organization, NCAI, declaring a pragmatic direction. The company is restructuring its organization so AI can be deployed immediately into the game development pipeline, and—centered around a new head—will accelerate commercialization of its VARCO model.

This marks a departure from a previously academic, R&D-centered approach, and instead signals a “vertical AI” strategy aimed at cutting costs and boosting productivity in real production environments—game art, scenarios, programming, and more. Observers interpret this decision by CEO Kim Taek-jin as reflecting a sense of crisis amid the industry downturn: that “technology that can’t make money is meaningless.”

This article was translated from the original that appeared on INVEN.