SK Telecom launches NVIDIA AI cloud to boost Korea's AI models
SK Telecom has entered into a partnership with VAST Data to deploy a NVIDIA-powered AI platform aimed at developing national AI foundation models in South Korea.
The initiative, known as the Haein Cluster, forms a cornerstone of the Korean Government's AI Computing Resource Utilisation Enhancement Programme. Under this collaboration, SK Telecom's infrastructure will utilise VAST Data's AI Operating System running on the NVIDIA Blackwell accelerated computing platform. This is intended to improve virtualisation, streamline AI data pipelines, and support the training and deployment of AI models on a national scale.
National infrastructure
The Haein Cluster has been selected to support the Ministry of Science and ICT's AI Computing Resource Utilisation Enhancement (GPU Rental Support) Programme. Its purpose is to underpin the development of AI foundation models in South Korea by leveraging sovereign infrastructure that keeps data and computation within national borders. SK Telecom's network and data centre capability, combined with the VAST AI OS, aims to deliver a fully virtualised GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) environment to meet the rising domestic demand for AI services.
Traditional AI infrastructure, which often relies on bare-metal environments, typically requires significant time to provision new workloads, sometimes taking days or weeks. In contrast, SK Telecom has introduced the Petasus AI Cloud architecture, now integrated with VAST Data, which can launch GPU environments in as little as 10 minutes. This arrangement claims to preserve the near bare-metal performance while drastically reducing provisioning time.
Disaggregated architecture
SK Telecom's solution uses VAST's disaggregated, shared-everything (DASE) platform on NVIDIA HGX server architecture provided by Supermicro. This setup helps to ensure a high-throughput, secure, and multi-tenant environment to support both AI training and inference for multiple use cases.
"Supermicro supports SK Telecom's vision of a national AI infrastructure and is proud to collaborate with VAST Data on deploying its AI Operating System and with NVIDIA Blackwell platforms to make this a reality," said Cenly Chen, Supermicro's Chief Growth Officer.
The Petasus AI Cloud is designed to support government, research, and enterprise requirements in South Korea, while maintaining operational control and compliance with regulatory obligations regarding data privacy and localisation.
DK Lee, Vice President and Head of the AI DC Lab at SK Telecom, stated: "VAST Data's unified architecture has been instrumental in helping us move from legacy bare-metal deployments to a fully virtualised, production-grade AI cloud. The VAST AI OS powers the performance, simplicity, and flexibility needed to support the next generation of sovereign AI workloads, and gives us the confidence to scale fast and securely. With VAST, we're enabling a GPUaaS platform that meets the exacting needs of government, research, and enterprise AI customers in South Korea."
Features and control
The VAST AI Operating System in this deployment offers sovereign-grade infrastructure control, meaning all services are provided within the country's borders. The system allows for the rapid provisioning of GPU environments, provides secure multi-tenant AI services, and supports a unified pipeline covering both training and inference activities. The platform also offers protocol flexibility, with native multi-protocol access that eliminates the need for additional gateways or vendor-specific solutions. Enterprise uptime is supported by carrier-grade resilience, and resource allocation is handled dynamically to meet the specific requirements of each tenant.
Sunil Chavan, Vice President, APAC, VAST Data, said, "SK Telecom is defining the future of national-scale AI infrastructure, and VAST is proud to support their vision. From our earliest conversations, it was clear that SKT needed cutting-edge infrastructure to match the speed and complexity of enterprise-grade uptime and nation-state inference and training. By eliminating traditional bottlenecks around data movement, provisioning, and security, VAST is enabling SKT to launch a sovereign and secure AI infrastructure that offers speed and flexibility at scale for Korea."
By leveraging NVIDIA's accelerators and VAST's AI Operating System, SK Telecom's Petasus AI Cloud stands as an example of how telecommunications providers are developing sovereign AI infrastructure for deployment at a national scale. The infrastructure is designed to balance compliance, cost, control, and performance, while supporting both public and private sector innovation in artificial intelligence.