SK Telecom plots "gigawatt scale" AI cloud in South Korea with Nvidia - Data Center Dynamics

SK Telecom of South Korea is partnering with NVIDIA to build a 'gigawatt-scale' AI cloud platform, marking a significant step in the country's AI infrastructure development. Based on NVIDIA's DSX plat... Read original →

SK Telecom’s gigawatt-scale AI cloud with NVIDIA represents a strategic pivot: transforming telco infrastructure into national compute fabric. This move will catalyze localized adoption of 3nm EUV chips, Spectrum-X networking, and liquid-cooled GPU racks, pressuring Korea’s semiconductor backend to upgrade rapidly. Amid tightening U.S. AI chip export controls, any reliance on components from Taiwan, China or mainland China could trigger secondary compliance scrutiny, inflating capex by over 15%. With Naver and LG also aligning with NVIDIA, Samsung Electronics is likely to counter with in-house AI accelerators and an open RISC-V ecosystem to avoid marginalization in domestic AI infrastructure. Over the next 18 months, expect Korea to enforce 'compute sovereignty' rules—mandating critical AI workloads run only in government-certified data centers—sparking regional AI cloud standards and forcing multinationals to rearchitect their Asia-Pacific deployments.