South Korea Hands SKT, Kakao and KT Free National AI

South Korea will offer free, unlimited AI for All access through SK Telecom, Kakao and KT, with a September beta and no token caps. The Ministry of Science and ICT will supply 512 Nvidia B200 GPUs this year and start paying nationwide running costs in 2027.

The three groups will run the chatbots as their own products, fold agents into KakaoTalk, phone calls and IPTV, and may build businesses on the prompts those tools collect.

Seoul Handed the Project to Three Incumbents

On August 28 the ministry three consortiums led by SK Telecom, Kakao and KT after written reviews and presentations from six bidders. Deputy Prime Minister and Science Minister Bae Kyung-hoon’s office will sign agreements in September, then take each service through a beta before a launch by year’s end. Scores and ranks stay unpublished at the bidders’ request.

The government opened AI for All in July as part of what it calls an “AI-basic society,” a setup in which people can use the tools regardless of income, age or digital skill. This round is not a build-and-hand-over IT contract. Private firms will operate the public service directly, keep the consumer relationship, and compete with one another on the same state brief.

THE AI FOR ALL CALENDAR

1. July 2026: The ministry opens the AI for All project and invites consortia to bid.
2. Mid-August 2026: Applications close with six consortia on the list.
3. August 28, 2026: SK Telecom, Kakao and KT are named as operators and allotted 512 B200 GPUs for this year.
4. September 2026: Agreements are due, with beta service to follow and a full launch by December.
5. 2027: National-budget support is scheduled to cover part of the cost of serving the whole population.

The English-language ministry account repeated those terms on September 1, with no change to the chip count, the 2027 money or the year-end launch window.

https://x.com/withmsit/status/2093167622309462092

Bae’s ministry also said it will sit with the operators and other departments to connect public data, so the agents can move from chat into actual filings. How a resident signs up, and which group goes live first, still has not been published.

KakaoTalk, Phone Calls and the IPTV Remote

Each winner proposed a front door people already open, rather than a new app that has to be marketed from zero. That is the part of the brief the ministry scored: points of contact, not a prettier chatbot window.

THREE FRONT DOORS IN THE WINNING BIDS

• KakaoTalk: Kakao will put a general chatbot and agents for reservations, applications and payments inside the messenger most Koreans already use, and it plans a lighter voice service with LG Uplus plus an agent marketplace.
• Phone and SMS: SK Telecom will take a request from planning through execution on apps, the web, calls and texts, and it says the agent can look up a shop or office and place the call when there is no digital form.
• Daum, mobile and IPTV: KT will pull users from Daum into a single conversation that can search, compare and finish a public or commercial task, then extend the same agent across its phone and TV services and partners such as Danawa, Musinsa and Zigbang.

SK Telecom told the ministry it would lean on about 22.5 million mobile subscriptions. Kakao’s bet is that the chat window becomes the place where a booking is made and paid. KT’s bet is that a person who starts on a portal or a set-top box never has to jump to a separate government site. The required agents are supposed to handle health care, finance, education and housing, not only Q&A, and to walk users through public procedures so benefits do not get missed.

Who Builds Each Service, and on Which Models

SK Telecom will lead with its A.X K2 model, Kakao with Kanana, and KT with Mi:dm K Pro 2.5, each mixing in other Korean systems and a long partner list that already touches cards, maps, hospitals, fashion retail and home listings. The ministry wants general chatbots that can beat foreign tools, plus specialized agents built with startups.

THE THREE OPERATING GROUPS

A.X K2 comes out of the government’s separate sovereign foundation-model work, where SK Telecom has already trained A.X models on its TITAN supercomputer. Goodoc and Seoul National University Hospital point the health agents at clinics that already sit in those groups. Zigbang puts housing search inside KT’s conversation. Shinhan shows up on both the SK Telecom and Kakao side, which is what a card network looks like when three national agents start filing and paying on a user’s behalf.

Half the Queries Must Hit Korean Models

Developers must use domestic models that meet the ministry’s independent foundation-model standards for at least 50 percent of the system. Operators also have to mix in models built by other Korean firms, so the public service is not a single-company stack even when one telco’s name is on the app. The ministry’s own write-up said the winning plans included chatbots designed to outperform foreign systems.

That rule is the industrial policy inside the free-access slogan. President Lee Jae-myung’s government has set aside 10.1 trillion won (about $7.2 billion) for AI-related spending in 2026, more than three times the 3.3 trillion won allocated the year before, and has talked about making the country one of the top three AI powers. AI for All is the consumer end of that spend: give the local models a daily job in tax, school and the clinic, and stop treating ChatGPT as the default Korean assistant.

A Korea Communications Commission and Korea Information Society Development Institute poll of 4,324 adults found 38.9 percent had used generative AI in 2025, up 14.9 percentage points, with a daily average of 49.6 minutes. Non-users pointed first at technical complexity, then at subscription fees and privacy. The free, phone-reachable design is aimed at that group as much as at people who already pay.

512 Blackwell GPUs Against ChatGPT’s Korean Base

The 2026 compute gift is 512 B200 GPUs in total, not 512 full racks, split among the three operators. A DGX B200 system packs eight Blackwell GPUs and 1,440 GB of Blackwell GPU memory, so the public allotment is a seed, not a national AI factory. Running costs shift toward the budget in 2027, which is the ministry’s answer if uncapped use outgrows that pool.

THE DEMAND THE PROGRAM IS CHASING

• ChatGPT in April: Ministry tender documents put Korean ChatGPT users at 23.45 million, against 8.45 million for Gemini and 2.41 million for Claude.
• Paid habit: A Korea Consumer Agency survey found 24.3 percent of generative AI users were paying subscribers, with the share at 30.1 percent among people in their 20s.
• State chips this year: 512 Nvidia B200 GPUs, with the program’s total cost still unpublished.
• 2026 AI budget: 10.1 trillion won, inside a wider push Lee has described as the country’s first budget for an AI era.

Those ChatGPT figures are why the free tier is the instrument. Local models have not pulled tens of millions off foreign free tiers on product quality alone. The state is now buying the distribution, then requiring Korean models to handle at least half the load, while foreign models, where they are allowed at all, draw no subsidy under the tender rules described in those documents. Unlimited tokens on 512 GPUs only works as a launch posture; the 2027 appropriation is the real meter.

Naver Walked Away From the Bid

Naver, which runs Korea’s largest mobile search and portal business and already offers free AI on its own products, did not join. The company said it considered the project and chose to stay with its existing AI work. People close to that choice pointed at a tight timetable and at a rule that forces operators to use other firms’ models, a poor return against the cost of standing up a national agent.

Naver was also cut in January from the national foundation-model project that feeds other government AI work, after questions about HyperCLOVA X’s data independence rather than raw scores. Another public miss would have landed on a company already answering doubts about its models. The result is a public AI layer that runs through two phone companies and Kakao, and not through the search box a large share of Koreans still use every morning.

LG Uplus appears as Kakao’s voice partner rather than as a lead operator. The six-bidder field included smaller names that did not survive the presentations. The ministry wanted reach. It picked the firms that already bill for a mobile plan, a TV package or a chat account.

Operators May Sell What the Prompts Teach

When the project launched, the government told operators to keep essential functions free even if usage grows past the donated GPUs, and to invent separate revenue models. It also said companies could build businesses on user prompts and other data generated by the services. That instruction sits underneath every “no token limits” headline: the chat is free at the point of use, and the logs are not treated as a dead end.

The three selected consortia will be provided with a total of 512 GPU B200 units this year, and government budget support for nationwide service delivery will begin in 2027.

Ministry of Science and ICT, official English statement on X

For SK Telecom, Kakao and KT, a no-profit year is still a year in which their agent becomes the way a parent asks for school material, a shop files for a grant, or a patient books a clinic without opening a ministry site. Compute costs fall on the state in 2026 and, in part, in 2027. Marketing costs fall because the front door is KakaoTalk, a phone number or the remote. The unpaid work is integration with tax, health and housing systems that the ministry has not yet specified in public.

Agreements are due this month. The ministry has not published the program’s total cost, the signup method, or the wiring that would let an agent actually complete a medical booking or a tax filing, which means the first beta will test the chat more than the civic machinery the brief describes.