SK Telecom and NVIDIA have announced plans to build a gigawatt-scale AI Cloud in Korea, with the first AI factory coming online in 2027. This AI Cloud will power training, inference and agentic workloads including sovereign, physical and enterprise AI services for companies and industries across Korea, with the vision to expand to greater Asia regions.
In a press release, SK Telecom explained that an AI Cloud is large-scale AI infrastructure comprising AI factories that manufacture tokens, building blocks of intelligence, from data. Unlike conventional large-scale providers offering general-purpose cloud services, AI Clouds specialize in GPU-based cloud computing tailored specifically for AI workloads across training, inference and agentic AI.
SKT’s AI Cloud will be built on NVIDIA DSX full stack reference architecture of software, hardware and operations.
“Telecom networks are becoming national AI infrastructure,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “They connect people, companies, devices and machines — and now they can become the backbone of new AI clouds. With NVIDIA DSX, SK Telecom can build Korea’s AI cloud at scale and bring agents, enterprise and physical AI to the companies and industries that power Korea and the world.”
“Through our close partnership with NVIDIA, we have now secured full-stack AI infrastructure capabilities, from chips to data center operations,” said Chey Tae-won, Chairman of SK Group. “We will work with NVIDIA to tackle GPU, memory, and energy challenges and become a leading AI cloud company shaping Asia’s AI ecosystem.”
As part of this collaboration, SKT will become an NVIDIA Cloud Partner, joining a global program through which participants use NVIDIA’s latest AI infrastructure, software and developer ecosystem to deliver excellent AI performance and economics through AI cloud services.