• South Korea’s SK Telecom is on course to become one of the world’s biggest AI datacentre operators
• The move is part of a broader play by its parent company, SK Group
• SK Telecom outlined its AI infrastructure strategy in a new TelecomTV report

For the past four years, SK Telecom (SKT) has been referring to itself as an AI company and has been shifting its corporate focus more towards the development of AI-based services and the development of, and investment in, AI factory infrastructure. 

That strategy reached a pivotal point at the start of July when SKT’s parent company, SK Group, shared a major investment plan that included about 1,000tn won ($642bn) towards AI datacentre facilities and supporting infrastructure as part of a strategy to position SKT, and South Korea, as a major regional and global AI hub. 

Naturally, SKT was put in charge of the AI infrastructure programme, which is set to result in one of the largest AI datacentre deployments in the world – 15 gigawatts (GW) of capacity, with an initial 5GW to be deployed as soon as 2029.

Now SKT has shared more details about its AI datacentre deployment plans, including where it will build its AI factories and the expected capacity of those facilities, in this detailed announcement. SKT had earlier outlined how it plans to manage its various AI factory deployments as an AI cloud, using technology developed by Nvidia. 

Separately, it has also provided in-depth insights into its AI infrastructure strategy – including details of its planned services, why it believes it has a unique offer for prospective customers and the AI factory rollout challenges it faces over the next few years – in TelecomTV’s latest free-to-download 33-page report, Trends In Telco AI Infrastructure.   

In the report, SKT’s CTO and head of its AI Company-in-Company (CIC), Chung Suk-geun, explains that “digital sovereignty is a core pillar” of the company’s AI infrastructure strategy and that SKT’s Haein GPU cluster, which comprises more than 1,000 Nvidia B200 GPUs at its Gasan AI datacentre in Seoul and has been commercially operational since August 2025 (delivering GPUaaS for large-scale AI training and inference workloads), is South Korea’s “first sovereign AI cloud, fully compliant with Korea’s Cloud Security Assurance Program (CSAP), ensuring that sensitive AI workloads remain within national boundaries under domestic data governance. Haein was selected by the Korean government as core computing infrastructure for the national Sovereign AI Foundation Model Project, supporting the development of globally competitive, nationally strategic AI models,” notes the CTO. 

He also outlines the AI infrastructure services that SKT is offering, in particular GPUaaS (GPU-as-a-service), which  provides “dedicated GPU resources in a cloud-based model for AI training and inference.” 

According to Chung, the technology that underpins the GPUaaS offering is a key differentiator for SKT. “Our Petasus AI Cloud virtualisation platform, AI Cloud Manager, and GPUaaS Service Orchestrator form an end-to-end platform that reduces deployment lead times to under one day and minimises economic losses from delayed fault detection – capabilities few telco-operated AI clouds can match,” he notes, before detailing the types of services SKT plans to offer in the future. 

The CTO concludes: “Telcos are uniquely positioned to become the backbone of national AI infrastructure. They bring together a rare combination of assets – nationwide network infrastructure built over decades, deep operational expertise in managing mission-critical networks, edge computing capabilities that extend AI to the network edge, and the regulatory trust that comes with operating critical national infrastructure. This makes telcos natural partners for sovereign AI – nations seeking to build AI capabilities within their own borders need infrastructure providers they can trust, and telcos are uniquely suited to that role.”

For the full picture behind SKT’s AI infrastructure strategy, and to discover the key foundations underpinning the AI factory strategies at Swisscom, Telenor, Telia and Telus, download the report for free today via this link. 

And to keep up with all the key developments in the world of telecom AI, including the latest AI-Native Telco Accelerator (ANTA) developments, check out TelecomTV’s dedicated AI-native telco channel. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV