A renovated SK Telecom T Factory AI data center in Seoul / Courtesy of SK Telecom
SK Telecom said Wednesday it will establish a $500 million artificial intelligence (AI) investment fund with Japan's NTT and Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom, marking a cross-border push by three of East Asia's largest telecommunications companies to jointly develop the global AI ecosystem.
The three companies announced the plan at a joint press conference at NTT's headquarters in the Otemachi business district of Tokyo.
The fund, called the IOWN AI Fund — named after NTT's Innovative Optical and Wireless Network initiative — will be managed through a newly incorporated fund management company called Catalight Capital, jointly established by the three telecom companies and based across Silicon Valley and East Asia.
The fund is expected to reach $500 million in total commitments and will target startups and technology companies in North America, Asia and Europe across five areas: AI data center infrastructure, such as power efficiency optimization and liquid cooling; AI semiconductors, including accelerators, graphics processing units and neural processing units; AI service applications in sectors such as health care, manufacturing and finance; AI software for cloud distributed systems and inference optimization; and optical communications technologies that improve data transmission performance and energy efficiency.
