SK Telecom is working with VAST Data to deploy its advanced AI platform on SKT’s new sovereign AI infrastructure powered by the latest NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs.
Named the Haein Cluster, this AI infrastructure, designed initially for GPUaaS has been selected for the Ministry of Science and ICT’s ‘AI Computing Resource Utilisation Enhancement (GPU Rental Support) Program’ in Korea, and will be actively used for the development of national AI foundation models.
By combining SKT’s advanced network and data centre infrastructure with the VAST AI OS as a key component of its sovereign AI cloud, SKT is creating a fully virtualised GPU-as-a-Service (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 virtualised AI infrastructure stack – Petasus AI Cloud – now integrated with VAST Data 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 virtualised, production-grade AI cloud,” said DK Lee, VP and head of the AI DC Lab at SK Telecom.
“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,” said Lee. “With VAST, we’re enabling a GPUaaS platform that meets the exacting needs of government, research, and enterprise AI customers in South Korea.”
Sunil Chavan, VP in APAC at VAST Data, said that by eliminating traditional bottlenecks around data movement, provisioning, and security, VAST is enabling SKT to launch a sovereign and secure AI infrastructure that offers speed and flexibility at scale for South Korea.
By combining NVIDIA accelerated computing platforms with VAST’s AI Operating System, SKT has built its Petasus AI Cloud as an elastic, sovereign infrastructure powered by next-generation superchips such as NVIDIA Blackwell.
This deployment demonstrates how telecom providers are building sovereign AI infrastructure for nations that balance speed, compliance, control, and cost, with VAST’s AI OS at the heart of this transformation.
