Omdia: "SKT AI Data Center Business to Become Core Revenue Source"

"Monetization Structure Established Through AI Investment," Omdia Assesses

SK Telecom CEO

Global market research firm Omdia has assessed that the financial performance of SK Telecom's artificial intelligence (AI) data center (DC) business demonstrates the potential of its monetization model. There is an outlook that the AI DC business will emerge as SK Telecom's core revenue source in the future.

According to the SK Telecom newsroom on March 24, Omdia stated in its report, "Sovereign AI Infrastructure: SK Telecom Rethinks Cloud Tech Stack to Solve GPU Monetization Challenge," published on March 18, that SK Telecom is establishing a tangible monetization structure through its AI technology competitiveness and investments, thereby addressing the issues faced by global telecommunications companies.

Omdia identified SK Telecom as a leading player driving the global transition to sovereign AI infrastructure. Omdia highlighted that SK Telecom independently solved chronic challenges of AI infrastructure with its "Haein Cluster" and "Petasus AI Cloud." "Haein" is a high-performance GPU infrastructure that forms a single cluster with over 1,000 NVIDIA B200s, equipped with NVIDIA's next-generation AI accelerator chip "Blackwell."

Based on Haein, SK Telecom provides an optimized computational environment for large-scale AI model training and inference, enabling customers to utilize GPU resources as needed. The company's proprietary virtualization solution, "Petasus AI Cloud," is applied to Haein. This year, Haein won the "Best Cloud Solution" award at MWC26's GLOMO Awards.

The report explained that with SK Telecom's proprietary large language model (LLM) "A.X K1" and the "Sovereign AI Service Package" unveiled at MWC26, the company has completed an end-to-end structure that integrates infrastructure (AI DC), model (A.X), and service, concretely demonstrating how technological competitiveness can establish a business revenue structure.

In particular, the report highlighted the financial performance of SK Telecom's AI DC business. It noted that annual sales reached 354 million dollars last year, up about 35% from the previous year, driven by increased utilization rates at major data centers in Gasan and Yangju. The company also holds a solid roadmap to achieve 700 million dollars (approximately 1 trillion won) in AI DC sales by 2030, which is projected to become a key revenue source accounting for about 5% of total sales.

Omdia's chief analyst, Inderpreet Kaur, said, "SK Telecom's strategy is challenging and future-oriented, presenting a clear long-term path to monetization by achieving Korea's sovereign AI goals and solving AI infrastructure optimization challenges."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.