• Samsung SDS plans about 200 customer-facing AI engineers by year-end, using internal transfers and external recruitment to build the team
  • Planned data-centre additions in 2028 and 2029 put customer implementation work on a much earlier timetable

The Fact

Samsung SDS plans to expand its customer-facing AI engineering team to about 200 by the end of 2026, executives said at its Real Summit event in Seoul on 8 September. Newsis reported that the company will retrain existing employees for field-engineering roles and recruit externally where it lacks experience. The team is intended to support both Samsung affiliates and outside customers.

Executives said the engineers will work from identifying a customer's business problem through implementation and operation. Samsung SDS plans to combine employees' existing industry knowledge with a stronger understanding of AI and large language models.

Chief executive Lee Jun-hee also outlined the company's data-centre schedule. The existing Dongtan AI data centre is due to be followed by the National AI Computing Center in 2028 and the Gumi facility in 2029. Those dates remain forward-looking.

The assessment

The 200-person target puts part of Samsung SDS's AI expansion into customer projects this year. A buyer can have models and computing capacity available but still need engineers who understand its operations well enough to turn a proposed use case into a working system. Samsung SDS can therefore be judged on implementation before its next large facilities open.

How the team is built matters. Existing staff may know a customer's industry, while outside hires can fill technical gaps. The total, however, will not show whether a particular project has the right people at the right time or whether the same engineers stay involved when the system moves into routine operation.

For BTW readers, this separates a staffing problem from a capacity problem. A delayed 2026 project would need to be assessed against the engineers assigned, the application itself and the compute already available. The 2028 and 2029 facilities are a separate capacity question. That distinction makes it easier to see whether the current limit is implementation or infrastructure.

What to watch

Watch whether Samsung SDS reaches the 200-person target and explains how those engineers are assigned. A customer deployment that follows the same team from problem definition into routine operation would show whether the staffing increase is translating into usable delivery capacity before the new data centres arrive.