IBM this week opened a new cloud data center in Korea that will include an artificial intelligence platform, letting developers create services that use IBM's Watson.

Located in Pangyo, Korea, near Seoul, the data center is being built with help from IT services company SK Holdings C&C, which has already been working with IBM on artificial intelligence.

The Pangyo facility will be IBM's ninth Asia-Pacific cloud data center and 47th overall, so in that sense, it's not so special. But like many large tech companies, IBM is interested in nurturing relationships with customer and partners in Asia. An increased physical presence in the region could help.

Korea-based customers of IBM Cloud include security startup UpRoot; social media analytics firm Coolio; and Gravity, which builds massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG).

SK Holdings is part of Korea's SK Group and a cousin organization to SK Telecom. Its partnership with IBM was announced in May, the goal being to help Watson learn Korean (making it the AI platform's eighth language) and to create APIs for Korean developers to take advantage of Watson.

IBM showed off some of Watson's talents in May in the form of Nao-mi, a robot that could learn music and dance to it. Nao-mi was developed by SoftBank.