SK Telecom deploys Nvidia Blackwell GPUs for AI training as it pivots from telco to AI infrastructure giant

SK Telecom is no longer content just connecting phone calls. The South Korean telecom giant launched “Haein,” a sovereign AI infrastructure platform integrating over 1,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, making it one of the largest GPU clusters in the country.

The platform, which went live on August 5, 2025, offers GPU-as-a-Service and has been selected to support South Korea’s national AI foundation model program.

What Haein actually does

At its core, Haein handles both training and inference, the two most compute-hungry tasks in the AI stack.

SKT partnered with VAST Data to implement what VAST calls its “AI Operating System,” software specifically tailored for Nvidia Blackwell infrastructures. Supermicro also contributed to the hardware optimization. The partnership, announced on August 14, 2025, focuses on improving virtualization and data pipeline performance for multi-tenant setups.

From 1,000 GPUs to 50,000

SK Group’s broader AI factory initiative calls for deploying more than 50,000 Nvidia GPUs, with SKT serving as a key partner in that buildout. The Haein platform builds on a previous cluster based on Nvidia H100 chips.

As of June 2026, SKT and Nvidia announced plans to scale this infrastructure to a “gigawatt-scale AI Cloud” using the Nvidia DSX platform. The first AI factory powered by this initiative is expected to come online in 2027. SKT is targeting AI training, inference, robotics, and various industrial applications.

Why a telecom company is building AI factories

The sovereign AI angle gives SKT something cloud hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft can’t easily replicate. South Korea’s government wants AI infrastructure that stays within national borders, built and operated by domestic companies.

Being selected as a provider for the national AI foundation model program is the clearest signal of this advantage.

What this means for investors

The GPUaaS model deserves attention from anyone watching the decentralized compute narrative. Projects like Render, Akash, and io.net have been trying to build decentralized GPU marketplaces. SKT is essentially building the centralized version of that same thesis, backed by a company with $16B-plus in annual revenue and direct government support.

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