Palantir, Cohere and Mistral push into South Korea's AI market

Global AI companies are moving deeper into South Korea's sovereign AI market, with Palantir, Cohere and Mistral each taking separate steps in the country, according to digitaltoday.co.kr. Cohere said at a press conference in South Korea that it plans to set up local subsidiaries in Korea and Japan and to double its Asia-Pacific technical and sales staff by the end of this year, while Mistral is recruiting full-time applied scientists and research engineers to work in Seoul.

Palantir has already held its second pop-up store event in South Korea, which the company used to stress its commitment to the country's sovereign AI market.

Elsewhere in the industry, OpenAI now offers its AI models to developers on Google Cloud, meaning its models are available on all three major global cloud services. Anthropic is preparing to release a new AI model that it says better grasps user intent, with stronger reasoning and intuition than its current models.

Meta acquired AI-based data analytics platform Sundial and launched its personal AI agent Muse in Japan, its first launch outside North America. Salesforce is acquiring AI marketing platform company Breeze for about $5.66 billion and introduced its AI agent specialist training program Partner FDE in South Korea for the first time.

Among startups, Recursive released Flint, a free coding model that runs on laptops, and Flapling Airplanes raised $1 billion in Series A funding. Chinese AI company Moonshot AI released its flagship LLM Kimi K3.1 Pro, which it says outperformed Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on some tasks. DeepSeek raised $15 billion in its second private funding round and aims to list on the Shanghai stock exchange early next year.

Infrastructure and enterprise deals

Nvidia released the OpenShell Reference Architecture for controlling enterprise AI agents and open-sourced its entire Run:ai platform. AWS and Google released tools that let AI app code built with the PyTorch framework run on their own AI chips without modification, and Google Cloud unveiled Agent Compute Engine, an infrastructure service optimized for running AI agents.

Dell Technologies unveiled a new deskside agentic AI solution and purpose-built AI infrastructure as part of strengthening its Nvidia-based Dell AI Factory. Dassault Systèmes is collaborating with Vertiv to speed up the design and construction of AI factories, allowing infrastructure to be configured, simulated and verified virtually before it is built.

In Korea, Douzone Bizon signed an MOU with law firm Shin & Kim on AI governance and compliance cooperation. AI marketing agent VCAT.AI took part as the AI production company for TV Asahi's period drama Sanada Juyushi. Megazone Cloud obtained AWS Authorized Government Reseller status and will supply AWS GovCloud (US) to public sector and regulated industry customers in the United States. Flex signed an MOU with Microsoft Korea to support AI transformation at Korean companies, and Channel Corporation introduced Voice ALF, an AI phone service for voice AI consultations.