SK Hyper Seeks $350 Billion to Fund the First 5GW Phase of a 15GW Korean AI Data Center Plan

SK Hyper, a data center subsidiary that SK Telecom established only in July, is in talks with major technology companies and financial investors to finance one of the most ambitious infrastructure proposals ever attached to a corporate balance sheet: 15 gigawatts of data center capacity in South Korea by 2035. Chief executive Chung Suk-geun told Bloomberg Television that the first 5GW phase alone would require roughly $350 billion once servers and other equipment are counted.

The financing plan is staged rather than upfront. SK Hyper aims to secure its first round of external capital by the end of this year or early 2027, followed by further fundraising over the next three to four years, with the total project cost shared between data center tenants and outside investors. SK Telecom itself has committed up to 750 billion won, about $567 million, to the unit through 2030.

The buildout already has physical anchors. SK Hyper is developing a 900-megawatt project in the southern industrial city of Ulsan alongside a previously announced 100-megawatt facility for Amazon Web Services, and plans a cluster of more than 2GW in the Yeongnam region before adding gigawatt-scale sites in Chungcheong and the southwest. Chung said the first data centers are scheduled for completion in 2029, and that the company could begin generating revenue as early as next year.

The demand math is the hard part. Korea's entire data center market is currently about 1GW, which means the first phase alone would be roughly five times the size of everything the country operates today. Chung said domestic demand cannot carry a project of this scale, so SK Hyper is courting hyperscalers to bring AI inference hubs serving Japan, Taiwan and other Asian markets to Korea, alongside sovereign and enterprise AI demand at home.

The pitch lands amid visible investor anxiety. Funding sources for data center projects have grown nervous that spending on future AI services will not justify the trillions of dollars flowing into global compute buildout, and Korean chip and telecom stocks have sold off hard over the past month, with SK Hynix down about 35 percent and Samsung Electronics down more than 27 percent. Chung said the company will manage risk by adjusting the pace of investment to confirmed demand rather than committing to the full plan in advance.

"Until last year, the key competitive edge was who had secured the most graphics processing units," Chung said. "Now what matters is who can generate tokens at the lowest cost and achieve the highest efficiency." He argued that SK Group's affiliates in chips, energy and telecommunications can offset Korea's relatively high electricity prices through computing efficiency, a claim that will be tested in practice rather than in interviews.

The $350 billion figure is extraordinary by any measure, and the plan's credibility rests on whether global customers actually commit. But the strategic logic it reflects is now standard across Asia: governments and conglomerates are concluding that sovereign AI infrastructure is a national asset, and they are willing to put numbers on that belief that would have sounded absurd two years ago.