Chey Tae-won, Chairman of SK Group, is delivering the keynote speech on the theme "AI Now & Next" at the SK AI Summit 2025 held at COEX in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, on November 3rd.
SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won unveiled the company's strategic plans to pioneer the next phase of artificial intelligence (AI) development during his keynote speech at the SK AI Summit 2025 on November 3rd, held at COEX in Gangnam, Seoul.
Chey highlighted three critical challenges that SK will focus on to open the future of AI: ensuring a stable supply of next-generation memory semiconductors to support advanced AI chips, building the infrastructure necessary for future AI applications, and actively leveraging AI to solve complex problems. He emphasized that SK aims to become the “most efficient AI solutions provider,” working closely with customers and partners to shape tomorrow’s AI landscape.
The summit, which is South Korea’s largest AI event with approximately 30,000 participants last year, showcased SK’s cutting-edge capabilities in semiconductors, energy solutions, AI data centers, and agent services. This year’s theme, “AI Now & Next,” aimed to diagnose the current state of AI while exploring future directions. It also involved discussions with global tech giants and academic experts on the latest AI trends.
Chey Tae-won reflected on SK’s efforts over the past year to advance the AI ecosystem, noting that AI was the predominant topic at the recent 2025 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in Gyeongju, South Korea. “AI is transforming industries, economies, and individual lives. Continuous innovation is essential to secure our AI competitive edge,” he said.
One of the key issues discussed was the surge in demand for AI infrastructure investments. Despite the $600 billion annually invested globally in data centers—growing at an average rate of 24% over five years—the investments from leading tech companies such as OpenAI and Meta are significantly higher, indicating an unpredictable growth pattern akin to energy and oil sectors. Chey Tae-won emphasized that AI demand has risen due to factors such as the expansion of inference capabilities, increased B2B AI adoption, the rise of AI agents, and the intensifying race among nations to develop sovereign (or nation-controlled) AI.
He underscored SK's core role in meeting this rising demand by providing the “most efficient AI solutions,” aiming to address supply-demand mismatches that could become bottlenecks. The company plans to concentrate on areas like memory semiconductors, AI infrastructure, and AI application deployment, asserting that "AI should shift from a skill-based competition to an efficiency-based paradigm," which would also help reduce AI disparities.
Regarding semiconductors, Chey Tae-won highlighted that while AI chip performance—such as GPUs—continues to improve annually, the supply of memory semiconductors needed for AI computing cannot keep pace. SK plans to boost capacity by deploying new facilities, including SK Hynix’s upcoming Cheongju M15X fab and the Yongsan Semiconductor Cluster, which will significantly increase memory chip production capacity.
He also emphasized SK’s efforts to develop ideal AI infrastructure, including data centers built and managed by SK. These include the 'Haein' high-performance computing cluster in Guro, Seoul, the ongoing SK AI Data Center project in Ulsan in partnership with AWS, and recently announced centers in the southwestern region. “AI is ultimately solvable by AI,” Chey Tae-won said, highlighting initiatives to automate and virtualize data center operations and increase the speed and quality of memory chip production, collaborating with companies like NVIDIA.
Furthermore, he detailed SK's collaboration with NVIDIA, including the development of a virtual factory using digital twin technology for manufacturing optimization, aiming for fully autonomous semiconductor production in the future. The company also plans to develop AI tools such as an enterprise AI agent, similar to SK Telecom's ‘A Dot Biz,’ to boost productivity.
At the event’s end, Chey Tae-won featured a series of videos from top global industry leaders, including Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, emphasizing their support for SK’s AI and data center partnerships. Jassy praised SK and AWS’s joint initiative in the Ulsan AI Data Center, while Altman stressed the importance of large-scale infrastructure investments for continuous AI development.
The summit also included insights from other leaders, such as SK Telecom’s CEO and SK Hynix’s CEO, outlining their respective visions for AI infrastructure and semiconductors. Experts from NVIDIA and Anthropic discussed next-generation AI design and safety, respectively.
