SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won wants to stop just selling memory chips. He wants to sell memory like a cloud service.
The concept, called Memory-as-a-Service (MaaS), would fundamentally change how data centers consume one of their most critical resources. Instead of buying stacks of physical chips and bolting them into servers, customers would tap into pooled, composable memory infrastructure on demand.
From chips to subscriptions
The MaaS strategy leverages CXL (Compute Express Link) interconnect technology, which allows memory to be disaggregated from individual servers and shared across an entire data center. Rather than each server having its own dedicated memory that sits idle when not in use, CXL lets you create a giant shared pool that any server can draw from as needed.
Chey first signaled this strategic direction as early as 2022. The timing wasn’t accidental. AI workloads were beginning their exponential climb, and the memory demands of training large language models were exposing the limitations of traditional server architectures.
