Beyond Hynix: SK's Three-Company AI Alliance Eyes Full-Stack Jackpot

SKT, Square, and Networks lead the charge
Three affiliates accelerate AI transformation across distinct sectors
Expectations grow for completion of group-wide AI value chain

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[Korea Financial Times, Jeong Chaeyun] SK Telecom, SK Square, and SK Networks — three SK Group affiliates — are drawing growing market attention as they undergo fundamental business transformations centered on artificial intelligence. Despite operating in vastly different sectors, all three companies are restructuring their growth strategies around AI as a common denominator, fueling expectations of a "jackpot" across the group's entire value chain.

AI Platform Leadership

SK Telecom has reaffirmed its sharp insight into the IT market through its investment in global AI startup Anthropic.

Anthropic, in which SK Telecom participated as a strategic partner from the early stages, is currently valued at approximately KRW 2 trillion to KRW 4 trillion — roughly 20 times the original investment. The two companies are also reportedly engaged in model collaboration that allows integration with SK Telecom's proprietary AI platform, AIX, leveraging Anthropic's strength in generative AI model technology.

Building on this investment success, SK Telecom is accelerating expansion across the AI software and platform space. Last year, revenue from its AI data center business reached KRW 519.9 billion, up 35% year-on-year, and the company is scaling its GPUaaS (AIaaS) model centered on the HAEIN cluster powered by NVIDIA B200 graphics processing units (GPUs).

This year, the company plans to expand to a hyperscale capacity of over 1 gigawatt (GW) through global partnerships. On March 1, at MWC 2026 (Mobile World Congress), SK Telecom CEO Jeong Jae-heon unveiled an "AI-native" innovation strategy encompassing a sweeping AI infrastructure overhaul and large-scale investment plans.

At the event, CEO Jeong also announced plans to establish an "AI Infrastructure Belt," which includes building an AI data center in the southwestern region of South Korea in collaboration with OpenAI.

As a result, high growth in data center revenue is expected this year, and there is mounting consensus that AI infrastructure is effectively becoming the company's new cash cow. Leveraging this infrastructure foundation, SK Telecom is expanding its consumer touchpoints through its AI assistant A. (A dot).

As of the fourth quarter of last year, A.'s user base surpassed 11.2 million. Looking ahead, the company plans to upgrade its proprietary 519-billion-parameter foundation AI model — the largest in South Korea — to over 1,000 billion (1 trillion) parameters, aiming to secure AI sovereignty while driving innovation across industries.

In particular, beginning in the second half of this year, the company plans to advance its multimodal capabilities — starting with image data and expanding to voice and video data processing.

SK Telecom's full-stack AI strategy — spanning from the Anthropic investment and the HAEIN cluster and AI data center infrastructure to consumer-facing services such as A. — is already yielding tangible results, and is widely regarded as the central pillar cementing the group's AI platform leadership.

AI Investment Control Tower

SK Square is reinforcing its positioning as the group's AI investment hub by combining its semiconductor assets anchored by SK Hynix with targeted investments in AI and semiconductor startups.

The centerpiece is its investment in U.S. AI semiconductor startup D-Matrix. Since its initial investment, D-Matrix's valuation has risen approximately sevenfold to around KRW 3 trillion. In conjunction with SK Hynix's competitive edge in high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the investment is strengthening the group's AI chip ecosystem.

Over the past two years, SK Square has invested a total of KRW 30 billion across seven global AI semiconductor and infrastructure startups in the United States, Japan, and beyond — including D-Matrix. The company plans to deploy the remaining capital within this year to complete an AI portfolio totaling KRW 100 billion. Equity investments in companies such as U.S.-based Hammerspace — which specializes in data center efficiency software and AI infrastructure — are cited as representative examples.

The AI drive is also becoming increasingly evident in the company's organizational restructuring. SK Square has expanded its existing CIO and portfolio functions into a unified Strategic Investment Center (SIC) and established a dedicated AI Innovation division, bringing greater expertise to its AI and semiconductor investment activities.

Market observers largely view SK Square as filling the missing pieces in the AI full-stack spanning semiconductors, infrastructure, platforms, and services.

A structure is naturally taking shape in which SK Square leverages SK Hynix's competitive strength in AI memory such as HBM to invest in data center and AI infrastructure companies, while providing backend support for the AI service advancement and business model development of group affiliates including SK Telecom and SK Networks.

Analysts note that if this structure takes hold successfully, SK Square has significant room to be re-evaluated — not as a mere holding or investment company, but as a dedicated AI investment firm. There is also growing support for the view that the combination of SK Hynix's stability and the growth potential of AI investments could serve as a genuine differentiator in the highly volatile AI investment market.

Transformation into a Local AI Business Holding Company

SK Networks is accelerating its pivot to an "AI-centric business holding company" through an aggressive bet on AI startup Upstage. Upstage is a company with specialized B2B AI capabilities in document understanding, OCR, and search, and is regarded as one of South Korea's leading AI startups.

SK Networks served as the lead investor in Upstage's Series B round in early 2024, and last month exercised a call option to make an additional investment of KRW 47 billion. Upstage is currently conducting a pre-IPO funding round targeting approximately KRW 300 billion.

SK Networks' bet carries greater strategic weight than a simple financial investment — it represents a strategic alliance with a partner that possesses its own proprietary AI foundation model — making it closely tied to the broader expansion of the group's AI ecosystem.

SK Networks plans to embed Upstage's AI technology across its existing businesses in rental, mobility, and trading, with the aim of improving operational efficiency, enhancing customer experience, and creating new revenue streams.

Specific use cases under consideration include AI-powered automation and intelligent customer interactions for consultation, contract, and after-sales service processes in the rental business, and advanced vehicle operation and maintenance solutions leveraging vehicle and customer data in the mobility segment.

Through these efforts, SK Networks is broadening the scope of its collaboration with various AI startups and transitioning from a traditional trading-company model to a data- and AI-driven platform structure. Over the medium to long term, the company is expected to pursue positioning as an "AI business holding company."

Industry observers view the AI strategic moves of SK Telecom, SK Square, and SK Networks as a process in which each company seeks growth momentum through AI from distinct vantage points, while simultaneously fitting together the pieces of a group-wide "AI full-stack" strategy.

"Short-term cost burdens and earnings volatility stemming from expanded AI investment remain common risk factors," one industry official noted, "but as the value chain encompassing AI infrastructure, chips, platforms, and services is being filled in with concrete figures and investment deals, the three SK companies are being spotlighted anew as an AI infrastructure-investment-platform 'triangular formation.'"

Jeong Chaeyun (chaeyun@fntimes.com)