The VAST Data AI operating system within Petasus Cloud enables sovereign infrastructure control, keeping all AI services within Korea
In sum – what to know:
South Korea builds sovereign AI cloud – SKT’s Haein Cluster, powered by Nvidia Blackwell and VAST Data, supports national AI model development under a government-backed program.
Provisioning times cut to minutes – VAST integration reduces GPU workload setup from weeks to under 10 minutes, allowing faster scaling of training and inference workloads.
Telecoms step into sovereign AI – The project shows how telcos like SKT are becoming key players in creating secure national AI infrastructure.
VAST Data announced a collaboration with Koren operator SK Telecom (SKT) to support the telecom provider’s new sovereign AI infrastructure, built on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, the former said in a release.
The system will run on SKT’s Petasus AI Cloud, with VAST’s AI operating system at its core, enabling faster provisioning and streamlined AI model development.
The infrastructure, called the Haein Cluster, has been selected for Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT’s AI computing resource utilization enhancement program. It will provide resources for national AI foundation model development and make GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) widely available inside South Korea, the firm added.
The company also noted that traditional AI systems built on bare-metal environments can take days or weeks to provision new workloads, adding that SKT’s Petasus AI Cloud, integrated with VAST, reduces this to under 10 minutes while maintaining near bare-metal performance. This allows researchers, enterprises, and government agencies to scale AI workloads more quickly and securely, it added.
The Petasus AI Cloud combines VAST’s disaggregated, shared-everything (DASE) platform with Nvidia HGX servers built by Supermicro.
“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.”
The VAST AI operating system within Petasus Cloud enables:
-Sovereign infrastructure control, keeping all AI services within Korea.
-Rapid GPUaaS provisioning, with virtualized environments ready in under 10 minutes.
-Multi-tenant security, with workload isolation and performance guarantees.
-Support for both AI training and inference pipelines.
-Carrier-grade uptime with simplified operations.
-Elastic, scalable GPUaaS to meet rising demand.
“SK Telecom is defining the future of national-scale AI infrastructure, and VAST is proud to support their vision,” said Sunil Chavan, vice president of the APAC region at 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.”
SK Telecom had been recently selected as the top bidder for a government-funded GPU leasing project aimed at strengthening South Korea’s domestic AI capabilities—even though the telco lacks certification under the Cloud Security Assurance Program (CSAP), a key security standard required by the government.
A report by local newspaper The Chosun Daily reported that the selection of SK Telecom drew criticism from industry stakeholders.
The report highlighted that the CSAP certification, managed by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA), evaluates whether cloud service providers have sufficient safeguards in place to protect against cyberattacks. An industry official quoted in the article questioned the rationale behind awarding the project to SK Telecom, particularly after the company experienced a significant hacking incident earlier this year and still lacks CSAP approval.
The Ministry launched a public tender in May for a project to lease GPU resources from private firms and make them available to AI developers across South Korea. The initiative is backed by KRW150 billion ($108 million) from South Korea’s first supplementary budget for 2025. In the bid to install 1,000 Nvidia B200 GPUs, SK Telecom emerged as the highest-ranked applicant.
