SK Telecom
publicSK Telecom (KRX: 017670), South Korea's largest mobile carrier, has evolved from a telco into a self-described "Global AI Company" under CEO Ryu Young-sang's AI Pyramid Strategy (AI Infrastructure, AI Transformation, AI Service). Its AI research traces back to the T-Brain lab (2017), which produced foundational Korean NLP models — KoBERT (2019), KoGPT2, and KoBART — that became standard benchmarks for the Korean open-source AI community.
The current research is organized under the A.X (AI Transformation) brand. A.X 3.1 (35B, trained in-house on the TITAN supercomputer) and A.X 4.0 (72B, built on Qwen2.5) target enterprise Korean AI, while A.X 4.0-VL-Light adds vision capabilities. The flagship A.X K1 (Dec 2025, 519B MoE / 33B active, 192+1 experts) is Korea's first 500B-scale model, developed by an 8-member SKT-led consortium with Korean government funding. It uses Multi-Latent Attention and a Think-Fusion architecture for hybrid reasoning/direct modes, achieving 80.2 KMMLU and 89.8 AIME25.
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- Ryu Young-sang — CEO
- Kim Tae-yoon — Head, Foundation Model Division
- Kim Ji-won — Head, AI Model Lab
News
- 2026-09-30 Korea Reviews Whether to Proceed With the National AI Foundation Model Project's Final Evaluation and Weighs a Separate Frontier-AI Company; Science Minister Says the Project Will Continue — The Korea Times
- 2026-08-27 SK Telecom Launches AI Data-Center Company SK Horizon With KKR and IMM Investing a Combined ₩3.08T (SKT Keeps 51%) — SK Telecom
- 2026-08-27 Korea Sovereign AI Project Stage-2 Scores: SKT 70.6, Upstage 69.9 and LG AI Research 69.0 Advance; Motif (65.8) Eliminated Despite Topping the AAII Component — The Korea Herald
- 2026-05-28 SKT Launches A.Biz Cowork Internal AI Agent (Beta) and AXMS 1.5 Platform Upgrade — Seoul Economic Daily
- 2026-05-14 SKT × Korean Defense Ministry Sign MOU on Applying Sovereign AI Foundation Model to Defense — SK Telecom
- 2026-04-10 SK Telecom Partners with Rebellions and Arm for Sovereign AI Inference Infrastructure — Rebellions