SK Telecom Enters AI Infra Race at MWC
At MWC Barcelona, SK Telecom introduced its 'Sovereign AI Package' strategy, positioning telcos as key players in AI infrastructure. The package combines proprietary models, infrastructure, and industry services, signaling that major telecommunications companies are moving to capture a piece of the AI value chain.
The push by telcos into AI is driven by the failure of general-purpose LLMs to comprehend specialized industry data, from network logs to regulatory standards. This creates a need for domain-specific models fine-tuned on telecom concepts, which SK Telecom has pursued through collaborations with OpenAI and Anthropic and the development of its own "Telco LLM". At the core of SKT's strategy is its proprietary A.X K1 foundation model, a hyperscale model with 519 billion parameters slated to exceed one trillion with added multimodal capabilities for processing images and video. This model runs on a sovereign AI infrastructure featuring one of Korea's largest GPU clusters, built with over 1,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and designed to be offered as a GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS). SKT is building a global alliance with partners like Singtel, e&, NTT, Orange, and Deutsche Telekom to create an AI infrastructure cooperation belt stretching from Asia to the
