Telecoms see AI businesses gain traction in Q2

Telecom companies are witnessing early success from their investments in artificial intelligence (AI) businesses, as reported in the second quarter. While traditional telecom operations remained relatively stagnant, AI data centers (AIDC), cloud, and AI transformation sectors reported growth. SK Telecom demonstrated the most significant progress in its AI infrastructure business.

Despite a slight year-on-year increase of 0.5 percent in overall revenue to 4.3591 trillion won ($3.08 billion), its operating profit surged by an impressive 67.3 percent to 566 billion won. The profit boost was attributed to the lack of one-time costs from a hacking incident that occurred last year. SK Telecom's AIDC business specifically grew by an extraordinary 92.5 percent year-on-year to 136.2 billion won, driven by increased data center operations and the rising demand for high-performance computing infrastructure due to the increasing adoption of generative AI.

To further capitalize on this trend, SK Telecom established a new company, SK Hyper, at the end of last month to manage AIDC business development. The company plans to invest a substantial 750 billion won through 2030 and aims to construct 5 gigawatts of data centers.