SK Telecom is teaming with NVIDIA on a national AI factory build-out in Korea, with the country’s largest carrier planning to anchor the project on the chipmaker’s DSX AI factory blueprint and bring the first facility online in 2027.
Phased Path To A Gigawatt Of AI Compute
The carrier said the first AI factory will not launch at gigawatt scale, but the buildout is designed to expand into gigawatt territory in phases. SK Telecom and NVIDIA framed the project as the foundation for sovereign, physical and agentic AI services for Korean enterprises across telecommunications, manufacturing, mobility and the public sector.
SK Telecom will combine its network, data center and enterprise infrastructure with NVIDIA accelerated computing, software and partner technologies, and the two companies will also pursue joint research on next-generation AI factory architectures.
DSX As Korea’s Sovereign AI Blueprint
NVIDIA DSX is the company’s reference architecture for full-stack AI factories, combining accelerated compute, racks, networking, software and partner-built integration into a deployable blueprint. Naver and NVIDIA are using the same playbook for two gigawatt sovereign AI factories, while LG and Doosan are layering DSX into industrial and robotics workloads.
Why It Matters
Korea is racing to build domestic AI capacity that does not depend on US hyperscalers, mirroring sovereign AI investments in Europe, Saudi Arabia and Japan. By staging the project as a sequence of DSX-aligned factories, SK Telecom can scale capacity as power, cooling and demand permits without committing to a single mega-site upfront.
Reporting based on coverage from the NVIDIA Newsroom, Computer Weekly and Data Center Dynamics.