SK Telecom Partners with VAST Data and NVIDIA for National-Scale AI Infrastructure in Korea

VAST Data has partnered with SK Telecom to optimize Korea's largest AI infrastructure based on NVIDIA Supercomputers. The Haein Cluster, a GPUaaS environment, is designed to meet national demand for AI model development and deployment within South Korea's borders. VAST Data's AI Operating System simplifies AI data pipelines and enhances virtualization, allowing for fast and secure AI training and inference at scale.

South Korea's leading telecommunications provider, SK Telecom, has partnered with VAST Data to optimize its largest AI infrastructure, the Haein Cluster. This GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) environment is designed to meet national demand for AI model development and deployment within South Korea's borders [1].

The Haein Cluster, powered by NVIDIA Supercomputers, leverages VAST Data's AI Operating System to simplify AI data pipelines and enhance virtualization. This collaboration allows for fast and secure AI training and inference at scale. By integrating directly with SK Telecom's Petasus AI Cloud, the VAST AI Operating System provides sovereign-grade infrastructure control, virtualization without compromise, secure multi-tenant AI services, and a unified pipeline for training and inference [1].

Traditional AI infrastructure built on bare-metal environments often requires days or even weeks to provision new workloads, a significant bottleneck for developers and enterprises. SK Telecom has eliminated this delay by deploying a virtualized AI infrastructure stack that can spin up GPU environments in as little as 10 minutes, all while preserving near bare-metal performance [1].

The Petasus AI Cloud architecture combines VAST's disaggregated, shared-everything (DASE) platform on NVIDIA HGX server architecture built by Supermicro, enabling a high-throughput, secure, and multi-tenant environment that supports both AI training and inference at scale [1].

"Supermicro supports SK Telecom’s vision of a national AI infrastructure and is proud to collaborate with VAST Data on deploying its AI Operating System and with NVIDIA Blackwell platforms to make this a reality," said Cenly Chen, Supermicro’s Chief Growth Officer [1].

"VAST Data’s unified architecture has been instrumental in helping us move from legacy bare-metal deployments to a fully virtualized, production-grade AI cloud," said DK Lee, Vice President, and Head of the AI DC Lab at SK Telecom [1].

By combining NVIDIA accelerated computing platforms with VAST's AI Operating System, SK Telecom 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 [1].

References:
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vast-data-collaborates-sk-telecom-130000056.html