SK Telecom — Ulsan AI Mega Campus

SK Telecom’s Ulsan AI Mega Campus is a flagship 1 GW hyperscale project designed to anchor South Korea’s sovereign AI computing ambitions. Announced in early 2026, the facility is one of the most ambitious single-site AI data center announcements in Asia — if completed at full capacity, it would be among the five largest AI data center campuses globally.

Ulsan was selected for several strategic reasons: the city has substantial industrial power infrastructure (it is home to Hyundai Motor’s primary assembly plants and HD Hyundai’s shipyards, requiring heavy industrial electrical supply), available industrial land, and a position on South Korea’s eastern coast with good connectivity. The SK-AWS collaboration at the adjacent Ulsan site (tracked separately) demonstrates the city’s emergence as South Korea’s AI infrastructure hub outside Seoul.

SK Telecom is positioning the Ulsan campus as a GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) offering — selling compute time to Korean enterprises, government research programs, and eventually international customers seeking South Korean AI compute capacity. The facility targets South Korea’s domestic LLM developers (including KT, Kakao, NAVER, and SK’s own T3K AI unit), semiconductor firms (Samsung, SK Hynix), defense AI programs, and industrial automation developers in the automotive and shipbuilding sectors concentrated in the Ulsan-Busan corridor.

South Korea’s government has explicitly targeted AI infrastructure buildout as a national priority, with the Ministry of Science and ICT coordinating investment through the “AI Computing Infrastructure Strategy.” The Ulsan campus is a centerpiece of that strategy. Renewable energy for the campus is planned through SK’s partnerships with offshore wind developers in the Yellow Sea.