SK Telecom, VAST Data Launch Sovereign AI Cloud with Blackwell GPUs

South Korea’s SK Telecom (SKT) has entered into a partnership with VAST Data to accelerate its transformation into a leading AI-driven enterprise. The collaboration centers on building a sovereign artificial intelligence infrastructure using VAST Data’s AI Operating System (AI OS), the latest NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, and SKT’s own Petasus AI Cloud platform.

Together, these technologies are being deployed to form the Haein Cluster, a next-generation GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) environment designed to meet South Korea’s growing demand for AI development and deployment.

The Haein Cluster has already been selected for the Ministry of Science and ICT’s ‘AI Computing Resource Utilization Enhancement Program,’ which aims to bolster the country’s national AI capabilities. By moving beyond traditional bare-metal deployments, SKT is creating a fully virtualized system that significantly reduces provisioning times. Whereas provisioning new workloads once took days or weeks, the Petasus AI Cloud allows developers to spin up GPU environments in less than ten minutes while maintaining near bare-metal performance. This leap in efficiency provides the foundation for large-scale AI training and inference workloads across public, private, and research sectors.

The Petasus AI Cloud integrates VAST Data’s disaggregated, shared-everything (DASE) platform with Supermicro’s NVIDIA HGX server architecture, enabling a high-throughput, multi-tenant environment. This integration offers a range of benefits: sovereign-grade infrastructure that ensures workloads remain within national borders, virtualization without performance compromises, secure multi-tenant services, and dynamic resource allocation that tailors GPU, storage, and networking resources to each tenant. Together, these features create a flexible, secure, and scalable system that can adapt to both government and enterprise AI requirements.

Executives from across the partnership emphasized the strategic significance of the deployment. DK Lee, Vice President and Head of SKT’s AI Data Center Lab, highlighted that VAST Data’s unified architecture has allowed SKT to evolve from legacy systems to a production-grade AI cloud capable of supporting the next wave of autonomous AI workloads. Sunil Chavan, Vice President of APAC at VAST Data, stressed the importance of delivering speed, compliance, and security at a national scale, noting that SKT’s requirements go beyond enterprise needs to support state-level infrastructure for AI training and inference. Supermicro, meanwhile, underscored its role in delivering the hardware architecture to make the collaboration viable, describing the initiative as a milestone for sovereign AI.

Empowering Data Sovereignty

For SKT, the partnership represents a long-term strategy to expand its role beyond telecommunications into national AI leadership. The integration of VAST Data’s AI OS with NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platforms positions the company to support both domestic innovation and international competitiveness. By enabling sovereign control of data and infrastructure, the system also addresses compliance and security challenges that increasingly define AI at scale.

The collaboration illustrates how telecom operators are reimagining their role in the AI era. SKT’s Petasus AI Cloud is designed not just as a service for enterprises but as a backbone for the nation’s AI economy. Its capacity to streamline training and inference pipelines, provide carrier-grade uptime, and dynamically adapt resources sets a precedent for other countries seeking to balance speed, sovereignty, and scalability in AI adoption.

With the deployment of the Haein Cluster, SKT and VAST Data are creating a blueprint for sovereign AI infrastructure that could redefine how governments, research institutions, and enterprises approach AI innovation. As global competition for AI leadership intensifies, the initiative signals South Korea’s intent to position itself at the forefront of secure, autonomous, and scalable AI development.