VAST Data partnered with SK Telecom to launch a sovereign AI infrastructure in South Korea designed to accelerate training and inference at national scale. The initiative centers on SKT’s new Petasus AI Cloud, powered by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and integrated with VAST’s AI Operating System. The system supports GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) for government, research, and enterprise customers, reducing provisioning times from days to minutes while maintaining near bare-metal performance.
The sovereign platform, known as the Haein Cluster, was selected for Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT “AI Computing Resource Utilization Enhancement Program” and will be used for developing national foundation AI models. Built on NVIDIA HGX servers from Supermicro and VAST’s disaggregated, shared-everything (DASE) architecture, the Petasus AI Cloud delivers secure, multi-tenant, high-throughput virtualization. The approach enables simplified data pipelines, dynamic resource allocation, and protocol flexibility for both training and inference.
SKT executives said the deployment allows them to move beyond legacy bare-metal environments toward a fully virtualized, production-grade AI cloud with carrier-grade reliability. VAST described the system as eliminating bottlenecks in data movement, provisioning, and security while meeting sovereign infrastructure requirements.
• Sovereign-grade AI infrastructure hosted fully within South Korea
• GPU environments provisioned in under 10 minutes with bare-metal performance
• Multi-tenant, secure virtualization with dynamic resource allocation
• Unified pipelines for training and inference at national scale
• Partnership includes NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and Supermicro HGX systems
“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.
🌐 Analysis: This partnership reflects a broader trend of telecom operators positioning themselves as sovereign AI infrastructure providers. By combining high-performance GPU clusters with virtualization at scale, SK Telecom is aligning with government initiatives while differentiating itself from hyperscalers. VAST’s role as an AI OS provider also underscores a growing market for integrated AI stacks that simplify deployment while maintaining national compliance. Competitors such as Naver Cloud and KT are pursuing similar sovereign AI strategies in Korea, making this deployment an important milestone in the race for national AI platforms.