SK Group chairman urges AI push across chips, ICT, batteries

SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won has urged the group’s major subsidiaries to adopt AI to boost global competitiveness.

Chey made the remarks in a New Year message to employees, highlighting the potential for AI to reshape memory chips, ICT, energy solutions, and battery businesses.

SK Group, based in South Korea, operates in sectors including semiconductors through SK hynix, telecommunications via SK Telecom, and energy with SK Innovation.

Chey said AI is now a core part of global industry and called for an “integrated AI solution” that draws on the group’s expertise across multiple fields.

He also credited SK’s employees for recent operational improvements and portfolio adjustments.

🔗 Source: The Korea Times

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

AI plans stay broad as teams push for specifics

Chey’s New Year message repeats themes from the November 2025 SK AI Summit. SK hynix plans KRW 103 trillion (USD 74.3 billion) over five years, with about 80% for AI memory like High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) 1.
Subsidiary timelines remain scattered for 2025–2026. SK hynix’s Cheongju M15X fab starts full operation in 2026, while Yongin’s first fab opens in 2027 2. SK Telecom’s 1 gigawatt (GW) Ulsan Artificial Intelligence Data Center (AIDC) targets the Asian market but lacks a firm completion date 3.
Group coordination looks promising. SK Innovation’s Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) power plants could feed SK Telecom’s Vietnam AIDC with cold-energy cooling (using LNG regasification chill for data center cooling) 3. Investors still lack clarity on where money goes between domestic hubs (SK Telecom’s three regional hubs 3) and overseas builds in Vietnam and Southeast Asia 3.

Korean AI infrastructure buildout creates entry points for compute and energy vendors

Korea plans to deploy over a quarter-million NVIDIA GPUs across sovereign clouds (government-controlled cloud infrastructure) and AI factories (large-scale compute clusters purpose-built for AI) 4. SK’s AI factory targets more than 50,000 GPUs, with phase one set for late 2027 5. Samsung is building a similar-scale site 4. This buildout opens work for GPU hosting, power distribution, and cooling.
SK Telecom is selling an AIDC solution package that covers out-rack, clustering, in-rack, and energy systems 3. Out-rack and in-rack mean gear outside or inside server racks, while clustering covers interconnect and orchestration 3. This creates room for component makers and integration partners as SK expands hubs in Gasan, Ulsan, and southwestern Korea 3.
Foreign vendors face a localization push. South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) picked Korean partners for the sovereign AI project, including NAVER Cloud and SK Telecom 4. Joint ventures or technology licensing could be needed to enter projects that require multi-billion-dollar investments 6.