SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM) has unveiled A.X K1, a 519-billion-parameter hyperscale artificial intelligence model, marking South Korea’s first entry into the elite tier of ultra-large foundation models dominated by the United States and China.
The model positions AI as national infrastructure rather than a standalone product, as Seoul accelerates efforts to become one of the world’s top three AI powers.
A.X K1 is designed to function not merely as a commercial system, but as a “teacher model”, a foundational AI capable of transferring knowledge to smaller, task-specific models across industries. SK Telecom says this approach allows the broader ecosystem to innovate without every company needing to train massive models from scratch.
A 500B-Scale Model as National AI Infrastructure
At more than 500 billion parameters, A.X K1 operates at a scale where AI systems begin to demonstrate more stable performance in complex mathematical reasoning, multilingual comprehension, high-difficulty coding, and agent-based execution, according to global benchmarks.
Rather than competing directly with consumer chatbots, SK Telecom is positioning A.X K1 as digital social overhead capital, core infrastructure underpinning Korea’s AI economy.
The company plans to use the model to train and enhance sub-70B parameter models, enabling faster development of specialized AI systems for manufacturing, mobility, gaming, robotics, and enterprise services.
“AI for Everyone”: Nationwide Deployment Already Underway
A.X K1 will be deployed through A. (A-DoT), SK Telecom’s AI service platform, which already serves more than 10 million users nationwide. The company aims to make advanced AI accessible through phone calls, messaging, web services, and mobile applications, advancing its “AI for Everyone” strategy.
Consortium member Liner, which operates an expert knowledge search service with more than 11 million global users, is expected to leverage A.X K1 to improve multilingual accuracy and reliability—two persistent weaknesses in large language models.
Industrial use cases are also expanding rapidly. Planned applications include:
- A. Biz AI solutions for manufacturing
- Autonomous character dialogue and behavior in Krafton’s game titles
- Humanoid and embodied AI robots
- Real-time AI agents for enterprise workflows
A Testbed for Korea’s Semiconductor Ambitions
Beyond software, A.X K1 is intended to validate Korea’s AI semiconductor competitiveness.
Running models at non-standard hyperscale workloads (500B+ parameters) is seen as essential for stress-testing memory bandwidth, inter-GPU communication, and energy efficiency—the core bottlenecks in next-generation AI hardware.
Consortium member Rebellions contributed domestically developed NPU technology, while SK Telecom’s AI data centers provide the infrastructure needed to operate the model at scale.
A Full-Stack, Sovereign AI Consortium
The SK Telecom-led SKT Consortium brings together eight organizations spanning the full AI value chain:
- SK Telecom – AI platform and infrastructure
- Krafton – multimodal and global-scale AI R&D
- 42dot – on-device and edge AI
- Rebellions – AI semiconductors (NPU)
- Liner – expert-level information retrieval
- SelectStar – large-scale data validation and reliability
- Seoul National University & KAIST – foundational research
More than 20 additional institutions, including SK hynix and SK Innovation, have submitted letters of intent to participate in real-world validation of A.X K1.
Open-Source Strategy to Accelerate Ecosystem Growth
In a notable move, the consortium plans to release A.X K1 as open source to Korean companies and developers. APIs and development tools will be distributed through SK Telecom platforms and major developer communities, enabling rapid AI agent development.
Portions of the training data will also be disclosed through public and private platforms, alongside an integrated support framework for model development.
A Strategic Signal in the Global AI Race
“This marks a new inflection point in Korea’s journey toward becoming one of the world’s top three AI nations amid intensifying global competition,” said Kim Tae-yoon, Head of the Foundation Model Office at SK Telecom.
The launch underscores a broader shift in the AI race: national capability now depends not just on model performance, but on the ability to deploy, govern, and scale AI as infrastructure.
With A.X K1, South Korea is signaling that it intends to compete not at the application layer alone, but across semiconductors, models, data centers, and services.
