South Korea's two largest sovereign AI competitors released rival foundation models within 48 hours of each other this week, signaling the most direct head-to-head moment yet in a government-backed race that will cut its field from four teams to three when evaluators convene August 8–11. SK Telecom published A.X K2 — a 688-billion-parameter open-weight model — on Hugging Face on July 29 per SK Telecom's official announcement. LG AI Research followed with K-EXAONE 2.0, a 750-billion-parameter model, on July 31 per LG AI Research's announcement. Both models use nearly identical architectural blueprints — Mixture of Experts (MoE) design, 262,144-token context windows, and Apache 2.0 licensing. A model with 750 billion "total parameters" in a Mixture of Experts design does not engage all 750 billion during any single response; it divides its neural network into 256 specialized processing modules — "experts" — and dynamically routes each incoming text token through only eight of them. For K-EXAONE 2.0, only approximately 37 billion parameters are active during inference; for A.X K2, approximately 33 billion are active per token per NYU Shanghai RITS analysis. LG's model layers a hybrid attention mechanism on top of the MoE design, alternating between global attention layers and local sliding-window attention layers per LG's model card. A