The recognition honors Backend.AI for advancing AI technology adoption across Korean industry and for contributing to the creation of skilled engineering jobs.

Lablup Inc., the developer of Backend.AI, announced that it received the Presidential Commendation at the 2026 ICT Merit Awards, held on April 21 at the Korea Science and Technology Center as part of the Science and Information and Communication Day ceremony organized by the Ministry of Science and ICT.

The ICT Merit Awards are presented each year in conjunction with Science and Information and Communication Day to recognize organizations and individuals that have contributed to the growth of Korea's information and communication industry. Lablup was cited for expanding the development and deployment of AI technology, and for generating quality engineering employment, through its independently developed AI infrastructure operating platform.

Since its founding in 2015, Lablup has built Backend.AI, an AI infrastructure orchestration platform now in use at roughly 120 enterprises and institutions worldwide. Backend.AI manages heterogeneous AI accelerators, including NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and domestic NPUs, from a single platform. On NVIDIA GPUs, it applies container-level GPU virtualization (partitioning a single GPU so that multiple containers can share it concurrently) to raise utilization. The platform also integrates with leading high-performance storage systems so enterprises and research institutions can run their full infrastructure more efficiently.

This year's Presidential Commendation, awarded to Lablup as a corporate entity, follows the 2024 Industrial Service Medal presented to founder and CEO Jeongkyu Shin. Lablup plans to use the recognition as momentum for broadening the technical base of Korea's AI ecosystem and accelerating its entry into the global AI operations platform market.

"This award belongs to the team that has built Backend.AI together over the past 11 years, and to the customers who trusted the platform and put it to work," said Jeongkyu Shin, CEO of Lablup Inc. "In the end, AI transformation runs on the foundational software that ties models to accelerators. Lablup will keep growing Backend.AI into a platform used across more industries, so that anyone can put AI to work and scale it as freely as they need."

### About Lablup Inc.

Lablup Inc., founded in 2015, builds Backend.AI, a software-defined AI infrastructure platform that orchestrates heterogeneous GPU and NPU clusters at hyperscale with secure multi-tenancy and multi-node workload management. Its container-level GPU virtualization technology for NVIDIA GPUs further maximizes accelerator utilization across training, inference, and deployment. Headquartered in Seoul with a U.S. subsidiary in San Jose, Lablup manages AI infrastructure across 120+ sites worldwide, and Backend.AI is validated as NVIDIA DGX-Ready Software. Learn more at lablup.com.