IBM Watson supercomputer
IBM’s Watson AI software is best-known for winning at “Jeopardy!” in 2011. (Credit: IBM)

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.

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