SK Telecom is partnering with Arm and Korean AI chip startup Rebellion to develop AI data center infrastructure, as the industry shifts from model training to inference, the South Korean mobile carrier said Friday.
The three companies inked a partnership Thursday to build a server solution combining Arm's new data center processor, the Arm AGI CPU, with Rebellion's upcoming AI chip RebelCard, slated for release in the third quarter.
SKT said demand in the AI market was moving away from training large language models toward running them in real-world applications.
Unlike training workloads, inference must operate continuosly, making power efficiency a key factor in operating costs. The companies aim to reduce power use by using Rebellion's neural processing units, which are designed specifically for AI inference processing.
Arm's AGI CPU is its first in-house data center chip created specifically for AI inference, while Rebellion's RebelCard is designed for high-efficiency performance in large-scale inference workloads.
The companies demonstrated the combined solution at the "Arm Everywhere" event in San Francisco in March, running a real-time agentic AI service based on a 120-billion-parameter GPT model, underscoring its commercial viability.
SKT said it planned to deploy the new solution in its AI data centers to test performance and stability. The company is also reviewing the use of its proprietary foundation model, A.X K1, on the system, as part of a broader strategy to offer integrated AI infrastructure and software.
"By combining inference-optimized infrastructure with our proprietary foundation model, we aim to strengthen our competitiveness in AI data centers," said Lee Jae-shin, head of AI business development at SKT.
Arm Vice President Eddie Ramirez said the rapid growth of inference was driving demand for new data center architectures optimized for large-scale deployment.
Rebellion CTO Oh Jin-wook said the partnership brought together complementary strengths across hardware and software, saying it set a precedent for buliding AI-specialized infrastructure.
herim@heraldcorp.com
