SK Telecom and Nvidia Partner on A.X K2 AI Model Under South Korea's Government Initiative

Gate News message, April 22 — SK Telecom is collaborating with Nvidia on A.X K2, an AI foundation model developed under South Korea's government-backed "Proprietary AI Foundation Model" initiative aimed at strengthening the country's AI independence.

The partnership began in 2021 when SK Telecom built its Titan supercomputer using Nvidia A100 GPUs. Last year, the two companies trained A.X K1 using Nvidia's NeMo dataset, which SK Telecom said contains 519 billion parameters. A.X K2 will also leverage Nvidia tools, with both companies planning joint research on multimodal and vision language models.

SK Telecom leads a consortium including game developer Krafton and Rebellions, a South Korean AI inference chip maker specializing in neural processing units (NPUs). The consortium aims to build a full-stack AI platform with vertically integrated semiconductors and services. SK Telecom has announced plans to open-source its A.X models for academic research and commercial use to support the domestic AI ecosystem.