South Korea's Ministry of Science launched a coordinated program with 5 companies to develop sovereign foundation models from scratch, featuring large-scale MoE architectures like SK Telecom A.X-K1 (519B total / 33B active) and LG K-EXAONE (236B MoE / 23B active), with a total first-round budget of ~$140M. This initiative contrasts with EU approaches by focusing funding on fewer stakeholders and explicitly budgeting for data.

Meanwhile, Alibaba's Qwen-Image-2512 emerges as a leading open-source image generation model, rapidly integrated into various toolchains including AI-Toolkit and local inference paths with quantization support, and hosted on platforms like Replicate. The model has undergone extensive blind testing with over 10,000 rounds on AI Arena, highlighting its ecosystem adoption.