SK Telecom CEO Unveils 'AI Native' Overhaul at MWC

This "AI Native" push is part of a broader "AI Pyramid Strategy" that reorients SK Telecom around AI infrastructure, AI transformation, and AI services. The company is tripling its AI-related investments over the next five years, expecting them to constitute 33% of total investment, with a goal of reaching KRW 25 trillion in AI revenue by 2028. At the core of the strategy is a proprietary, telco-specific Large Language Model (LLM) developed to understand the nuances of the telecom industry. This specialized model is being co-developed with companies like Anthropic and Meta and is designed to be multilingual, supporting languages such as Korean, English, and German. The aim is to drastically cut customer service response times and improve operational efficiency. SK Telecom is a founding member of the Global Telco AI Alliance, a collaboration with Deutsche Telekom, e&, Singtel, and SoftBank. This alliance is creating a joint venture to develop and deploy telco-specific LLMs for a combined global customer base of approximately 1.3 billion people across 50 countries. The goal is to create a Telco AI Platform for new services and digital assistants. The infrastructure layer of this strategy is significant, with SK Telecom planning to build a hyperscale AI data center (AIDC) infrastructure exceeding 1 gigawatt in Korea. This includes a partnership with OpenAI to build an AIDC in the country's southwestern region. The company's U.S. venture capital arm, SK Telecom Americas, is actively investing in AI and infrastructure startups like Anthropic and Lambda to support this vision. This transformation, termed the "AI Grand Transition," will overhaul all internal IT systems—from billing to sales—to be AI-centric. The company is also developing its sovereign foundation model, A.X K1, which has 519 billion parameters and will be upgraded to over 1 trillion with multimodal capabilities for processing voice and video. The network itself is becoming "AI-native," with plans for AI agents to automate network management and AI-enabled RAN base stations. This move toward autonomous network operations is part of a 6G roadmap, positioning the infrastructure to support future AI services efficiently. This includes on-device AI for antenna optimization and integrated sensing and communication technologies. The vision extends to a full suite of services, including GPU-as-a-Service solutions and an "AI Inference Factory" to create a unified hardware and software stack for inference workloads. For developers and businesses, SK Telecom is launching open-source versions of its models and an AI B2B agent called 'adot Biz'.