SK Telecom, one of South Korea’s largest telecom operators and part of the wider SK Group, has revealed that it plans to build one of the country’s largest data centers. It also has ambitious goals surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) including building an AI Infra Super Highway.
SK Telecom’s CEO, Ryu Young-sang, shared these plans on the sidelines of the recently concluded Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2025 in Barcelona. He said that the company was planning a data center that will house 60,000 Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) with a power consumption capacity of 100 MW. But the company aims to expand the facility’s capacity to 1-2 GW in future, making it one of the biggest data centers in South Korea.
Readers would recall that SK Telecom launched its first AI data center in Seoul last year, introducing cloud-based GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS).
Ryu also unveiled the AI Pyramid 2.0 strategy whereby SK Telecom would integrate the latest technologies from group member companies and domestic and foreign partners in a bid to construct the AI Infra Super Highway. Ryu outlined four key business models for SK Telecom’s AI data center initiatives: GPUaaS, hyperscale AI data centers, modular AI data centers and customized AI data centers.
Korea Herald quoted him as saying, “Modular AI data centers can be constructed within three months in 20-40 kW units, similar to container boxes. They reduce construction costs by 70 percent and double a center’s power efficiency, making them ideal for startups and research institutions in urgent need of GPU resources.”
SK Telecom has also announced that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Giga Computing, a liquid cooling technology major, and SK Enmove, to jointly develop next-generation cooling solutions. Under this MoU, the three companies will collaborate on extensive research and development (R&D) efforts, including validating technologies to optimize liquid cooling performance and developing artificial intelligence data center solutions.
“As a market leader in cooling fluids, SK Enmove will leverage this collaboration to drive the growth of the liquid cooling market with optimized cooling fluids that can maximize data center energy efficiency and further solidify our position as a leader in energy efficiency,” said Kim Dae-jung (Head, Green Business Unit, SK Enmove).
SK Telecom is also at the forefront of Global Telco AI Alliance which it co-founded with Deutsche Telekom, e&, Singtel and SoftBank Corp, where they plan to co-develop and launch multilingual Large Language Models(Telco LLM) specifically tailored to the needs of telecommunications companies.