VAST Data is partnering with SK Telecom 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 Utilisation 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 centre infrastructure with the VAST AI OS as a key component of its sovereign AI cloud, SKT is creating a fully virtualised 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 virtualised 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 virtualised, 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.”
