SKT is South Korea’s leading telecommunications provider, ranked #1,185 on Forbes' 2025 Global 2000 list, and is transforming itself into an AI company.
SK Telecom and VAST Power Sovereign AI
VAST collaborates with SK Telecom to optimize Korea’s largest AI infrastructure based on NVIDIA Supercomputers
Industry Telecommunications
Use Case AI
Overview
Background
SKT deployed the VAST AI Operating System (AI OS) on its new sovereign GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS), powered by the latest NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. SKT’s Petasus AI Cloud uses VAST’s disaggregated, shared-everything (DASE) platform on NVIDIA HGX creating a secure, high-throughput, multi-tenant environment that supports scalable AI training
Outcome
By combining SKT’s advanced network and data center infrastructure with the VAST AI OS as a key component of its sovereign AI cloud, SKT is creating a fully virtualized GPUaaS environment that meets the growing national demand for AI model development and deployment, all within South Korea’s borders.
Traditional AI infrastructure built on bare-metal environments often requires days or even weeks to provision new workloads, a major bottleneck for developers and enterprises. SKT has eliminated this delay by deploying a virtualized AI infrastructure stack – Petasus AI Cloud - now integrated with VAST which can spin up GPU environments in as little as 10 minutes, all while preserving near bare-metal performance.
VAST Data’s unified architecture has been instrumental in helping us move from legacy bare-metal deployments to a fully virtualized, 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 delivering a GPUaaS platform that meets the exacting needs of government, research, and enterprise AI customers in South Korea.
DK Lee
Vice President, and Head of AI DC Lab, SK Telecom