LG Unveils Self-Evolving AI Strategy at MWC 2026

LG (003550) has thrown down the gauntlet in the global market at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2026, the world's largest mobile communications exhibition, with self-evolving artificial intelligence at the forefront of its strategy. The company unveiled its vision to completely shift the market paradigm away from volume wars over AI model size and computational power toward practical AI that directly solves real-world problems and creates added value.

LG AI Research and LG Uplus (032640) held a joint press conference in Barcelona, Spain, on March 1 (local time), one day before MWC opened, announcing the "One Team LG" AI technology roadmap.

Lim Woo-hyung, Co-Director of LG AI Research, revealed the blueprint for K-EXAONE, Korea's flagship AI model, for the first time. "The AI that LG pursues is not about competing for the highest intelligence, but about being a true partner that helps human life in the real world," Lim said. "Within the first half of this year, we will complete the highest-performing language model among all existing global open-weight models."

Plans for massive infrastructure to support this initiative were also introduced. Lee Sang-yeop, Chief Technology Officer of LG Uplus, said, "We are preparing the Paju AI Data Center (AIDC), the largest in the Seoul metropolitan area, timed for when K-EXAONE enters its completion phase next year." The Paju AIDC, scheduled for completion in 2027, will be built at a 200-megawatt scale capable of housing up to 120,000 graphics processing units (GPUs). It is expected to serve as the key outpost for the One LG strategy, consolidating capabilities from affiliates including LG Electronics (066570), LG Energy Solution, and LG CNS.

LG, which pioneered multimodal AI in Korea, also announced the launch of EXAONE 4.5, an advanced Vision Language Model (VLM). VLM is a cutting-edge technology that combines language and visual intelligence to understand and communicate with text and images in a complex manner, much like humans.

This model is positioned as a core competitive advantage that will usher in the era of Physical AI, serving as the brain for KAPEX, Korea's humanoid robot. "We have expanded modalities based on know-how accumulated over many years," Lim said. "EXAONE 4.5 will boast the world's best performance among open-weight models of comparable size." He added that the model would be released to the public soon.

LG Uplus put its Agentic Architecture strategy front and center—a framework where AI learns and evolves on its own. While existing AI has been limited to passively answering user questions, next-generation AI continuously repeats the cycle of "plan-execute-evaluate-modify" to autonomously find optimal solutions.

To achieve this, LG Uplus presented four core technologies: "Self-Advancement" that automatically improves through real-time data; "Model-Data Foundry" dedicated to data refinement and tuning; "Trusted Integrated Control" that perfectly orchestrates collaboration between AI systems; and "Hybrid AI Infrastructure" that achieves both stability and cost-effectiveness.

"The real battleground in the AI era is not about overwhelming competitors with massive computational resources, but about how precisely you can design a self-evolving cycle," CTO Lee said. "We will overturn the market landscape with customized services that make customers genuinely feel that 'LG's AI truly understands me.'"