SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM) announced today that it has signed a collaboration agreement with SK hynix and Penguin Solutions (NASDAQ: PENG) to pursue joint research, development, and business promotion of artificial intelligence data center (AIDC) solutions.

The agreement ceremony was held today at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., and was attended by the CEOs of each company: Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SK Telecom, Justin Kim, AI Infrastructure President of SK hynix, and Mark Adams, CEO of Penguin Solutions.

SK Telecom signed a $200 million strategic investment agreement with Penguin Solutions in July of 2024, and shortly thereafter, together with SK hynix and Penguin Solutions, formed a task force to explore ways to leverage their complementary capabilities to enhance customer offerings.

Through the collaboration agreement, the three companies will explore business opportunities in the Asia-Pacific and Middle East markets, including Japan, that could enable global expansion. In addition, they plan to build on their respective existing software capabilities to jointly develop and commercialize a full-stack software solution needed to build and operate AIDCs. Furthermore, SK hynix and Penguin Solutions plan to cooperate in the development of next-generation data center memory technology.

“This collaboration agreement lays the foundation for building globally competitive AI data centers,” said Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SK Telecom. “We will combine the unique technologies of SK Group, such as semiconductors, energy, cooling and memory, with cooperation from global companies to discover and develop a highly competitive AI infrastructure business model.”

“Innovation of semiconductor memory technology is essential for the efficient operation of AI data centers, and improving power efficiency and heat dissipation performance is the key challenge,” SK hynix said, “Through collaboration with SK Telecom and Penguin Solutions, we plan to overcome the limitations of memory technology and lead the expansion of global AI ecosystem."

“Today’s collaboration announcement with SK Telecom and SK hynix for the development of AI data centers builds on Penguin’s strengths in solving the complexity of AI,” said Mark Adams, CEO of Penguin Solutions. “Penguin is excited about the potential of expanding our design, build, deployment, and management of cutting-edge AI solutions by leveraging the broad technology capabilities of SK Telecom and SK hynix, and bringing our experience and innovative expertise into additional markets to provide value to new customers.”