SK telecom partners with Lambda for AI data center

In January, at Lambda’s headquarters in San Jose, Yoo Young-sang, CEO of SK Telecom(left), and Stephen Balaban, founder and CEO of Lambda, took a commemorative photo. [Courtesy of SK Telecom Co.]

SK telecom Co. will launch an artificial intelligence (AI) data center in Seoul in December 2024 in collaboration with Lambda Inc., a U.S.-based company specializing in cloud-based graphics processing unit (GPU) services.

The South Korean telecom carrier announced on Tuesday that it signed a partnership agreement with Lambda for the joint AI cloud project.

Lambda, which offers AI cloud services using the latest GPUs from Nvidia Corp., counts global tech giants such as Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. among its clients. The two companies will install Nvidia’s H100 GPUs at SK broadband Co.’s data center in Gasan-dong, southwest of Seoul.

Given the surge in domestic GPU demand due to the growing AI market, SK telecom plans to boost its GPU inventory to several thousand units within three years and introduce the H200, its latest GPU model, ahead of schedule. The goal is to expand the Gasan data center into South Korea’s largest GPU farm using Nvidia’s GPUs. SK broadband will also implement a rack power density of 44 kilowatts (kW), which is nine times the 4.8 kW average rack power density in domestic data centers.

With the opening of the AI data center, Lambda will also open a Korean region, its first in the Asia-Pacific region. SK telecom plans to launch a subscription-based AI cloud service, or GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS), leveraging Lambda’s GPU resources. GPUaaS enables enterprise customers to rent virtual GPU resources via the cloud for AI service development or usage instead of purchasing them outright. Alongside GPUaaS, SK telecom will offer promotions including a GPU replacement compensation program and cloud cost optimization consulting for domestic startups and small to medium-sized enterprises.

Market research firm Fortune Business Insights projects the global GPUaaS market will hit $49.84 billion by 2032.