Remote-First-Company | SEOUL, South Korea and NEW YORK CITY, Aug. 14, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, today announced a partnership with SK Telecom (SKT), South Korea’s leading telecommunications provider that’s transforming itself into an AI company. To deploy its advanced AI platform on SKT’s new sovereign AI infrastructure powered by the latest NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs.

Named the Haein Cluster, this AI infrastructure, designed initially for GPUaaS has been selected for the Ministry of Science and ICT’s “AI Computing Resource Utilization Enhancement (GPU Rental Support) Program” in Korea, and will be actively used for the development of national AI foundation models. By combining SKT’s advanced network and data center infrastructure with the VAST AI OS as a key component of its sovereign AI cloud, SKT is creating a fully virtualized GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) environment that meets the growing national demand for AI model development and deployment, all within South Korea’s borders. 

Traditional AI infrastructure built on bare-metal environments often requires days or even weeks to provision new workloads, a major bottleneck for developers and enterprises. SKT has eliminated this delay by deploying a virtualized AI infrastructure stack – Petasus AI Cloud - now integrated with VAST Data which can spin up GPU environments in as little as 10 minutes, all while preserving near bare-metal performance.

The Petasus AI Cloud architecture combines VAST’s disaggregated, shared-everything (DASE) platform on NVIDIA HGX server architecture built by Supermicro, enabling a high-throughput, secure, and multi-tenant environment that supports both AI training and inference at scale.

“Supermicro supports SK Telecom’s vision of a national AI infrastructure and is proud to collaborate with VAST Data on deploying its AI Operating System and with NVIDIA Blackwell platforms to make this a reality,” said Cenly Chen, Supermicro’s Chief Growth Officer.

“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. “The VAST AI OS powers the performance, simplicity, and flexibility needed to support the next generation of sovereign AI workloads, and gives us the confidence to scale fast and securely. With VAST, we’re enabling a GPUaaS platform that meets the exacting needs of government, research, and enterprise AI customers in South Korea.”

By integrating directly with SKT’s Petasus AI Cloud, the VAST AI Operating System provides: 

• Sovereign-Grade Infrastructure Control: Enables AI services entirely within national borders.
• Virtualization Without Compromise: GPU environments provision in under 10 minutes, matching bare-metal performance.
• Secure, Multi-Tenant AI Services: Isolates workloads with data privacy and performance guarantees.
• Unified Pipeline for Training and Inference: Simplifies the full lifecycle of AI development and deployment.
• Protocol Flexibility, Zero Friction: Native multi-protocol access with no need for client-side gateways or proprietary bloat.
• Enterprise-Grade Uptime with Lean Ops: Supports carrier-grade resilience with minimal overhead.
• Elastic GPUaaS at National Scale: Designed to meet growing demand from public and private sector AI innovators.
• Dynamic Resource Allocation: Automatically provisions and isolates GPU and storage resources, including their networking fabrics, to match each tenant’s specific requirements.

“SK Telecom is defining the future of national-scale AI infrastructure, and VAST is proud to support their vision,” commented Sunil Chavan, Vice President, APAC, VAST Data. “From our earliest conversations, it was clear that SKT needed cutting-edge infrastructure to match the speed and complexity of enterprise-grade uptime and nation-state inference and training. By eliminating traditional bottlenecks around data movement, provisioning, and security, VAST is enabling SKT to launch a sovereign and secure AI infrastructure that offers speed and flexibility at scale for Korea.” 

By combining NVIDIA accelerated computing platforms with VAST’s AI Operating System, SKT has built its Petasus AI Cloud as an elastic, sovereign infrastructure powered by next-generation superchips such as NVIDIA Blackwell. This deployment demonstrates how telecom providers are building sovereign AI infrastructure for nations that balance speed, compliance, control, and cost, with VAST’s AI OS at the heart of this transformation.

Additional Resources: 

• BLOG: SK Telecom and VAST Data: Breaking the GPU Virtualization Barrier
• SHARED EVERYTHING PODCAST: Rewriting the Rules of GPU Virtualization: SK Telecom’s Sovereign AI Cloud
• WEBINAR: Sept 10- Inside SK Telecom’s Sovereign AI Cloud: Practical Insights for Scalable AI Infrastructure

About VAST Data

VAST Data is the AI Operating System company – powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST’s breakthrough DASE architecture – the world’s first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience – VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI. Learn more at vastdata.com and follow VAST Data on LinkedIn, YouTube and X.

James Warnette
VAST Data
2085013383
press@vastdata.com