Kakao Corporation

Meanwhile, welcome to BlockTalk AI, the blockchain unicorns.

Today, we're covering a major corporate move out of South Korea, where Kakao has set an ambitious 6 trillion won revenue target for its planned Kakao AI unit by 2030, representing a substantial bet on artificial intelligence across Asia.

The announcement came during a minority shareholder meeting on September 16th.

That's right, Kim Do-young from Kakao's Group Investment Strategy Office disclosed these targets, which translate to roughly $4.3 billion.

To put that in perspective, the relevant businesses generated around 2.7 trillion won in 2025, so we're looking at more than doubling that figure.

Of the 6 trillion won target, approximately 1 trillion won is expected to come directly from AI services.

And this is all centered around KakaoTalk, correct? What's the technical approach here? KakaoAI will be built around KakaoTalk as the core platform.

The company plans to showcase multiple KakaoTalk AI agents at its October Developer Conference.

Well, XL Games, and most people don't know who the fuck they are, it's a Korean, uh, developer company f- that created the, my favorite MMO of all time, ArcheAge.

They actually sold the fucking rights for about three, $38.9 million to m- most of their games and usage to Kakao, Kakao Games affiliate company, Align Studio.

Kakao is behind, uh, Black Desert.

They're the one that published Black Desert, uh, from Pearl Abyss and whatnot.

So I trust the shit out of Kakao and know what they're doing because they, I've already seen footage on ArcheAge Chronicles.

It looks-

Mm-hmm

Fuck yeah.

I want to move on the next agenda about the e-commerce packaging.

So before we go to the packaging strategy, could you give us a brief introduction to Kakao? So what the Kakao application is and what competitive advantages does Kakao have in the e-commerce landscape in Korea?

For a guest in Korea, you very quickly learn that this is not a WhatsApp.

This is not a Viber environment.

This is a Kakao environment.

Almost 98% of all Koreans use Kakao for their daily messaging.

And what's interesting about it to us is that it also affords a very fast and seamless shopping capacity, one that particularly for gifting periods of time, which culturally are very important in Korea, we've started exploring more and more.

Yeah, like I don't really use the text message and the iMessage, rather I use the Kakao.

There are two different app systems that you can use in Seoul.

Naver, N as in Nancy, A-V-E-R, and Kakao, K-A-K-A-O.

Those are your two map systems.

The Google Maps are not going to really give you proper directions, unfortunately.

Translation, either Google Translation or Apple Translation or Papago Translation for your phone.

Those are pretty helpful, but you want to get those different apps for maps.

Kakao also has a taxi app, KakaoT.

That's how you can use taxis, but Uber does also work as well.

Created by Sosori, original novel or story.

At Studio does the art via Kike, what is that? Kakao Corporation.

Officially licensed in English by Tappy Toon as the Skeleton Soldier failed to defend the dungeon.

All right, all right, all right, I see you.

But yeah.

These guys are the ones who did solo leveling.

Kakao Webtoons.

And it's available via Tapas.

And that brings us to our deep dive.

South Korea has just selected SK Telecom, KT, and Kakao to deliver free domestic AI access to roughly 52 million citizens.

Let us break down why this represents a seismic shift in national AI strategy.

Let's start with what is actually being engineered here, because this is not an exploratory pilot program.

It is national digital infrastructure.

South Korea has assembled a three-way consortium comprising SK Telecom, KT, and Kakao to deliver a unified domestic AI service to essentially its entire population, powered out of the gate by an initial cluster of 512 NVIDIA B200 GPUs.

Now, by American hyperscaler standards, 512 GPUs is a modest starting footprint, but the design architecture is what matters.

This is engineered to scale as a shared national utility rather than a fragmented set of competing corporate stacks.

It's a massive initiative.

Yeah, they've built a consortium with SK Telecom, KT, and Kakao, and the government is directly supplying them with 512 Nvidia B200 GPUs to power the network.

But here's the catch.

Right.

Next, a national experiment.

South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT has selected three consortia led by SK Telecom, Kakao, and KT to build a national AI service that would be free and unlimited for roughly 52 million residents.

The program, called AI for All, treats access to generative AI as something closer to a public utility than a consumer subscription.

The services are planned rather than live.

President Lee Jae-myung's trillion-dollar AI pushback, back then anyways, covered chip fabs, it covered data centers.

Today's news is the consumer-facing side of this, that the government picked SK Telecom, Kakao, and KT out of six applicants to build a free national AI chatbot for all 52 million citizens worldwide.

Essentially treating AI the way it might treat broadband or public schools, right? Making it a utility.

Each provider has to build at least half the service on South Korean foundation models.