$SKM

CNBC reports SK Group’s Chey Tae-won expects a severe AI memory shortage next year and is considering overseas fab expansion. Separately, SK Hynix said its board approved 54.3 trillion won ($38 billion) for two new DRAM and NAND fabs. The US also warned South Korea to move on $200 billion investment plans or face higher tariffs.

SK Telecom shares (017670.KS) rose about 9% intraday to 99,000 won after reports of an expected Anthropic IPO and the government’s second evaluation of a sovereign AI foundation model project. Analysts cited SK Telecom’s AI/data-center expansion, including a 750 billion won plan for SK Hyper and stronger Q2 profits.

According to The Economist’s analysis of seven South Korean large-cap stock splits since 2000, only SK Telecom and Kakao showed gains on the first day after trading resumed, while most stocks declined or posted limited gains after 30 trading days. SK Telecom rose 2.64% and Kakao 7.05% on day one. The article also cites fractional-share trading as weakening the rationale for splits.

South Korea launched a bid for a government-backed cybersecurity AI foundation model, with two leading consortiums competing. One is anchored by LG (LG AI Research and LG Uplus), the other by SK Telecom and Naver Cloud. The government will fund the winner for 10 months with 256 Nvidia B200 GPUs and release the model as open source. LG Uplus and SK Telecom are both facing criminal scrutiny tied to cybersecurity incidents, and SK Telecom denies allegations linked to US export restrictions.

SK Telecom said Q2 revenue edged up 0.5% to 4.3591T won and operating profit rose 67.3% to 566B won, helped by lower one-off costs. Its AI data center business jumped 92.5% to 136.2B won. KT reported revenue 6.6799T won (-10.1%) and operating profit 648.3B won (-36.1%), but AI transformation revenue rose 22.3%. LG Uplus revenue fell 3.9% to 3.69T won, while operating profit rose 13.1% to 344.5B won, with AIDC revenue up 28.9% to 124.1B won.

SK Telecom appointed Ericsson as sole global technology partner for its Hyper-AI Network Infrastructure Demonstration Project, a government-backed initiative led by Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Information Society Agency. The project will build and test an AI-based RAN pilot and demonstrate physical AI services through 2027, with Ericsson contributing AI-RAN and automation tech including EIAP and rApps, later applied at KG Mobility’s plant.

SK Telecom said its A.X K2 AI model scored 29/42 on the 2026 International Mathematical Olympiad, matching the gold-medal threshold, and tied for first on the Hugging Face MathArena AIME 2026 leaderboard with 97.1% accuracy. The company also cited prior IMO 2025 results (35/42) and reported a 9.3 BrowseComp score for web-research tasks.

SK Telecom said it invested $100 million in Anthropic to co-develop a large multi-language AI model. Naver plans a wholly owned unit to sell AI computing services from Brookfield-financed data centers using Nvidia processors, and Nvidia will invest $1 billion for a 4.5% stake. Samsung and SK Hynix also joined Anthropic’s funding round.

Asia Today reports SK Telecom and AI chipmaker Rebellions are expanding an AI inference infrastructure using South Korean semiconductors. Counterpoint Research says 92% of sovereign AI LLMs were trained with Nvidia chips as of July. SK Telecom deployed Rebellions NPUs for its A. service and operated A.X K1, and said its AI data center business earned 136.2 billion won ($92.1m).

SK Telecom said it plans to expand AI data center capacity in South Korea to up to 15 gigawatts by 2035, aiming to meet rising global demand as supply tightens. The company also reported that its data center sales have doubled, and it outlined a planned investment of $653 billion for the buildout, according to the company.