SK Telecom invests in Lambda to foray into AI cloud market

SK Telecom Co., South Korea’s largest mobile carrier, said on Wednesday it has invested in Lambda, a graphics processing unit (GPU) cloud provider, to foray into the global AI data center market.

It is among the handful of investors that put a combined $320 million into Lambda in Series C funding, according to Lambda in a statement released last week. SK Telecom did not specify its investment amount in the funding round.

Lambda provides GPU cloud servers powered by Nvidia GPUs. The investment will enable SK to secure a stable supply of GPU cloud servers to enter the AI cloud and data center markets.

An AI data center is designed for AI workloads and contains an infrastructure to train and deploy machine learning models and algorithms.

SK Telecom CEO Yoo Young-sang has spearheaded the investment. He met with Lambda founder and CEO Stephen Balaban during Balaban's visit to Seoul last December. Last month, Yoo visited Lambda’s headquarters in San Jose, California, to proceed with the investment.

The two companies will form a strategic partnership in the first half of this year to explore business opportunities in the global AI cloud market.

SK Telecom said that unlike existing data centers, an AI data center is a new business area that provides the GPU cloud servers essential for AI learning and inference, power supply and a cooling system to manage thermal efficiency.

To bolster its competitiveness in the AI market, SK Telecom will harness the information and communications technology of its affiliates: high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips from SK Hynix Inc., data center operation know-how from SK Broadband Co. and data center-tailored AI chips from Sapeon, a fabless AI chip designer.

SK Telecom is eyeing Southeast Asia as its first overseas market for operating AI data centers.

It will showcase the outcome of its collaboration with a company capable of running data centers in Southeast Asia next week at MWC Barcelona, an annual trade show for the mobile communications industry. SK Telecom did not elaborate further.

“We will utilize SK Telecom’s AI capabilities and stable GPU supply to enter the AI data center and AI cloud markets,” Yoo said.

Write to Dong-Jin Hwang at radhwang@hankyung.com
 

Yeonhee Kim edited this article