South Korea's Kakao Bank (K-Bank) is seeking bids for a data center project.
The company is looking to construct what would be its fifth data center amid efforts to cut the risk of system failures, reports SBS Biz.
The bank has reportedly put out three competitive bidding notices for the data center, for which the company wants to begin deploying servers in July with a complete deployment date of February 2026.
The data center in question will be located in the Yongin Jukeon Data Center, which LG CNS has been constructing since 2022.
A Kakao Bank official said: "Once the data center building is completed in the first half of this year, we will immediately begin installing servers in the Kakao Bank leased portion."
The Jukjeon Data Center will span 99,070 sqm (1 million sq ft) and consist of four above-ground floors and four below-ground floors to provide commercial space for cloud service providers, ITSPs, and other IT companies. Construction began in March 2022, with a planned completion date of 2024, but this has since been delayed to mid-2025.
K-Bank will use the data center as its second disaster recovery center, with its first already located in Seongnam, Gyeonggi province.
According to the SNS report, K-Bank has four data centers currently: A main facility in Sangam, Seoul, a data center dedicated to AI, the Seongnam recovery center, and a backup data center in Gangseo-gu, Busan.
The publication further speculates that the bank was motivated by the Kakao Data Center Fire incident in October 2022, linked to the batteries at the SK Group data center. The fire brought down other Kakao services, including Kakao Talk, Kakao Pay, Kakao T, and Kakao Map. Kakao Bank was spared as it had other data centers separate from the SK Group facility.
Kakao Bank was founded in 2016 through a collaboration between Korea Investment Holdings and Kakao Corp.
