South Korea Launches Hangang Supercomputer, Plans Quantum Integration

Insider Brief

• South Korea has brought Hangang, its sixth national supercomputer, into full operation, with the government expecting it to rank among the world’s top 10 systems.
• Hangang has 8,496 GPUs and 9,936 CPUs, delivering 24 times the theoretical computing performance of its predecessor, Nurion, alongside improvements in storage and network capacity.
• The government plans to connect Hangang with a quantum computer in the first half of 2027 to develop a hybrid computing system combining high-performance computing and quantum processing.

South Korea’s sixth national supercomputer, Hangang, is now fully operational, Seoul Economic Daily reported. The government expects the system to place among the world’s top 10 machines.

It also intends to pair Hangang with a quantum computer in the first half of next year, forming a hybrid system meant to speed up both calculation and optimization.

The Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) said they held a launch ceremony on the 2nd at KISTI headquarters in Daejeon. Hangang succeeds Nurion, the fifth national supercomputer, which was introduced in 2018. The agencies said the ceremony opened a new phase for national infrastructure supporting AI-based science and technology research.