Press Release
June 22, 2026
Nota AI (CEO Myungsu Chae), a company specializing in AI model compression and optimization, announced its participation as a core technology partner in the Cheonan-Asan Consortium, which was recently selected as the final site for the Chungcheong region in the 'AI-Specialized Pilot City' public contest project hosted by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT).
Breaking through the data isolation limits of conventional smart cities, the AI-Specialized Pilot City is a large-scale national project where AI transforms urban data into knowledge assets to autonomously manage citizens' daily lives. The project will span five years from 2026 to 2030, with a total budget of KRW 610.9 billion.
Based on an integrated urban intelligence center and a digital twin platform, the Cheonan-Asan Consortium plans to demonstrate autonomous AI agent services in the fields of disaster management, traffic, and civil complaints. Within this framework, Nota AI will be responsible for edge AI optimization and on-device AI application technologies to ensure the stable deployment of urban AI services within actual infrastructure.
Specifically, Nota AI plans to compress and optimize AI models used in urban fields—such as traffic, safety, weather, disaster, and environment—to fit various edge environments. By combining this with a Large Language Model (LLM)-based automated reporting system and on-device AI technology, the company will establish a structure where AI perceives, summarizes, and disseminates urban situations. This enables real-time urban data from CCTVs, sensors, traffic feeds, and disaster updates to be analyzed directly on-site and rapidly converted into actionable insights for control centers and response teams, thereby supporting the AI-City's rapid awareness, judgment, and response system.
The project is also highly significant as a Sovereign AI-based urban service case that merges domestic AI models, localized urban data, and edge execution technology. The Cheonan-Asan Consortium will establish a proprietary AI ecosystem tailored to regional data based on Upstage's Korean-optimized LLM. Nota AI will provide the compression and optimization technology necessary for these AI services to run stably on edge infrastructure and terminal devices across the city. This marks a critical step forward, as it delivers the operational execution technology required to transition Sovereign AI from mere model ownership into practical public services.
This participation represents a major milestone where Nota AI's on-device AI optimization technology scales beyond individual devices and industrial sites into city-scale public infrastructure. Nota AI has continuously advanced its optimization technologies to efficiently run AI models across diverse hardware environments, including smartphones, automobiles, robots, and industrial equipment. In this Cheonan-Asan AI-Specialized Pilot City project, the company focuses on extending these technological capabilities into urban infrastructure to realize AI services that citizens can directly experience.
Furthermore, the city-scale AI service models secured through this project hold the potential to expand into domestic and international smart cities, public safety, traffic control, and disaster response sectors. Starting with Cheonan-Asan, Nota AI intends to contribute to building a standard model for K-AI cities—where AI perceives, judges, and responds to urban challenges—while broadening its technology application scope within the on-device AI and physical AI markets.
Myungsu Chae, CEO of Nota AI, stated, "An AI city is not merely a city that collects a vast amount of data, but one where AI understands the data generated on-site and connects it to necessary responses." He added, "Leveraging our AI model optimization and on-device AI technologies, Nota AI will play a pivotal role in ensuring that the Cheonan-Asan AI-Specialized Pilot City establishes itself as the definitive benchmark for South Korea's K-AI cities."
