IBM will emphasize Watson and AI at new cloud computing center in South Korea

IBM has opened a cloud data center in Pangyo, South Korea, bringing its total number of data centers to 47, with nine of them in the Asia-Pacific region, the company said today. The new center, outside Seoul, will help serve the cloud-services market in South Korea, which IDC said it expects to grow to 1 billion in 2019, from 445 million last year. The data center, built in collaboration with giant South Korean IT services provider SK Holdings C&C, will offer the standard Bluemix IBM cloud services and will emphasize helping local startups create cognitive apps and industry-specific services that use its IBM's Watson natural-language and machine learning offering. South Korean companies already using IBM's cloud include beauty-industry firm Amorepacific, social content-analysis firm Coolio, video game maker Gravity and data security startup UpRoot.