LG Heir and Utopai Launch AI Filmmaking Venture

A new joint venture, spearheaded by Brian Koo, the grandson of LG Group founder Koo In-hwoi, is wagering that AI-native infrastructure will transform how films and TV shows are created. The attempt, named Utopai East, brings together Koo’s investment firm, Stock Farm Road, with AI production company Utopai Studios to be a co-developer of entertainment content and the computing platform necessary to produce it.

Joint venture aims to build AI-native production platform

However, the JV is not only an AI tool but claims to be an end-to-end platform for licensed data, innovation intelligence, production environments, and delivery—optimized, of course, for film and television. It’s a 50–50 endeavor, and the first offerings are expected to be finished next year. Stock Farm Road was co-founded by Brian Koo. BADR Investments CEO Amin Badr-El-Din will contribute cash, innovation know-how, and a variety of media industry contacts.

Utopai to deliver AI stack while partnering with creators

Meanwhile, Utopai Studios will be responsible for delivering the AI stack and production environments and aims to do so while managing and partnering with filmmakers, not attempting to replace them. Outside of submissions, Utopai East wants to author, scale, and import Korean intellectual property for the rest of the world, a field where there is presently substantial market demand. For the past several years, Korean content revenues have surpassed $10 billion.

Addressing compute demands with 3-gigawatt data center

Generative AI is compute-hungry. The International Energy Agency estimates data centers already account for roughly 1 to 1.5% of global electricity use, with demand rising as AI workloads proliferate. That is one reason SFR recently agreed with the Jeollanam-do provincial government to develop a 3-gigawatt AI data center in South Korea—an immense footprint on par with the aggregate data center load in the largest U.S. markets. By anchoring Utopai East to that buildout, the partners say they can guarantee the throughput needed for high-fidelity text-to-video, asset generation, localization, and real-time pipelines.

For context, the world’s biggest content platforms have already shown how infrastructure unlocks new creative modes: the LED volume stages popularized by Industrial Light & Magic’s StageCraft changed virtual production, while large-scale machine learning drives personalization and localization across major streamers. The promise here is similar, but oriented to generative workflows at scale—storyboarding, previz, background and environment creation, and accelerated post-production—delivered under studio-grade governance and compute guarantees.

Safeguards for creators and compliance with labor rules

Utopai Studios claims its models and datasets are fully licensed and contractually cleared, a response to mounting litigation and rights debates around training data. The company emphasizes “human-in-the-loop” design: writers still write, directors still direct, actors still act. AI is presented as a force multiplier, rather than a substitute.

Those assurances are consistent with the drafting trend of recent entertainment labor agreements. The 2023 Writers Guild of America contract and subsequent SAG‑AFTRA agreement impose guardrails on AI usage, consent, and compensation. Any AI-forward pipeline intending to scale into studio work must meet—or surpass—these criteria, especially regarding synthetic likeness and voice applications. Licensing clarity is also crucial for distribution. As studios and streamers conduct more extensive due diligence on AI‑assisted content, traceable provenance—who owns the models, what data they have ingested, how outputs are governed—has become a gating variable for green lights and insurance.

Korea-first strategy with expansion across Asian markets

Utopai East will target Korean creators early but expand across Asia into Japan, China, and Thailand. The short-term opportunity is to translate hit IP into other languages and formats more quickly, including AI to expedite dubbing, subtitling, and market‑specific edits, all while dutifully safeguarding creative intent. Rights holders are attracted by the speed and breadth of deployment: one IP can generate distinct language releases, episodic miniseries, and short‑form spin‑offs faster, perhaps increasing the value of the franchise. The partners maintain that this is where AI can generate net‑new demand rather than just cost savings.

Funding and go-to-market plans and timeline

The partners did not disclose the deal’s financial specifics, but funding will be allocated through SFR vehicles, sovereign and institutional investors, and film industry participants. The venture will first deploy the two firms’ studio and cloud capacity before transitioning workloads onto the Jeollanam‑do campus as construction is finished.

Outlook: proving creative quality and operational gains

The first content from the collaboration is due out next year; true success will require Utopai East to prove that AI-assisted pipelines can bring both creative quality and operational benefits without generating audience or guild backlash. The bar is high. Viewers will not rate anything based on whether a scene was rendered or composited with the aid of a model but on story and performance.

Still, if Utopai East can demonstrate that it has enabled measurable improvements—shorter post schedules, stronger localization quality, and smaller VFX backlogs—while respecting rights and consent, it will be easy for others in the industry to follow in the producers’ footsteps. Beyond that, if their speculative 3-gigawatt build occurs, it will indicate that the entertainment industry is transitioning from using AI to experiment with it to AI infrastructure, with compute playing an even more prominent role in earnest. That is Koo’s strategic wager: that the following cinematic renaissance will be as driven by energy and data centers as by cameras and stages.