SK Telecom Pivots to 'AI Native' Strategy

This 'AI Native' pivot is built on SK Telecom's "AI Pyramid Strategy," which focuses on three core areas: AI Infrastructure, AI Transformation (AIX), and AI Services. To accelerate this, the company plans to increase its AI-related investments to 33% of its total investments between 2024 and 2028, a significant jump from the 12% allocated from 2019 to 2023. The infrastructure layer is foundational, involving the development of AI data centers, proprietary AI semiconductors, and large language models (LLMs). SKT is significantly expanding its data center capacity, aiming to nearly double it by 2030, incorporating energy-efficient technologies like liquid cooling. This includes building a hyperscale AI data center in Ulsan in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). A key element of the strategy is the creation of telco-specific LLMs. To achieve this, SK Telecom co-founded the Global Telco AI Alliance with partners like Deutsche Telekom, e&, Singtel, and SoftBank. This joint venture aims to develop multilingual LLMs tailored for the needs of telecom companies, serving a combined customer base of approximately 1.3 billion people across 50 countries. SK Telecom is also aggressively investing in leading AI companies to bolster its capabilities. It has made a $100 million investment in Anthropic to co-develop a telco-specific LLM and smaller investments in AI search engine Perplexity ($10 million) and GPU cloud provider Lambda. The investment in Anthropic, made when the company was valued at around $5 billion, has seen its value surge, with Anthropic's valuation reaching $350 billion in early 2026. This strategic shift follows a challenging period for the company. In April 2025, SKT suffered a significant data breach that exposed SIM-related data for nearly 25 million users, leading to a massive customer exodus and a 73% drop in net profit. The 'AI Native' transformation is seen as a critical response to move past this crisis and decouple from a stagnating mobile market. Under the leadership of CEO Ryu Young-sang, who also heads the newly formed "AI Company-in-Company" (AI CIC), the company is reorganizing to accelerate this transition. The AI CIC is a fast-moving internal unit designed to concentrate the company's AI capabilities and has a goal of reaching at least 5 trillion won in annual revenue by 2030. The company's vision extends to the 6G era, with its "ATHENA" white paper outlining a network evolution strategy built on AI-native architecture, zero-trust security, and hyper-connectivity. This involves applying AI-based automation across all network layers, from the radio access network (RAN) to the core, to enable real-time analytics and autonomous optimization. This AI-centric approach will also manifest in customer-facing services. SKT plans to launch a beta version of a global Personal AI Assistant (PAA) and integrate its telco-specific LLM into its AI Contact Center (AICC) to improve operations. Internal tests of the AICC with the specialized LLM have already shown a jump in employee satisfaction from 44% to 77%.