VAST Data has announced a partnership with SK Telecom to integrate its AI Operating System into SKT’s new sovereign AI infrastructure, known as the Haein Cluster. The deployment utilizes the latest NVIDIA Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) and is targeted at accelerating national AI model development for South Korea. SK Telecom reports that the Haein Cluster is initially designed for GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and has been selected for Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT’s “AI Computing Resource Utilization Enhancement (GPU Rental Support) Program.”
Key features of the integrated platform, as stated by VAST Data and SKT, include:
- Isolation and control for sovereign-grade infrastructure, ensuring data and services remain within South Korea’s borders
- Dynamic, virtualized provisioning of GPU resources with near bare-metal performance
- Support for secure, multi-tenant AI workloads with privacy and performance guarantees
- Unified pipelines for both AI model training and inference
- Multi-protocol, client-agnostic access
- Carrier-grade uptime and operational efficiency
- Elastic scaling for national public and private sector AI workloads
- Automated allocation and isolation of GPU and storage resources per tenant
“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 integrated solution, featuring Supermicro’s NVIDIA HGX-based servers, is positioned for deployment in data centers operated by telecom, research, and commercial providers that require high-throughput, sovereignty, and rapid deployment of AI resources within South Korea.
Source: VAST Data
