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SK Telecom B2B AI Push: Public Sector & Defense

SK Telecom B2B AI Push: Public Sector & Defense
SK Telecom is reorganizing around artificial intelligence to accelerate a B2B push, with a sharp focus on public sector and defense opportunities in South Korea. At a town hall marking six months in the role, SK Telecom’s CEO signaled a decisive shift: make AI the company’s growth engine and align operations, culture, and go-to-market around enterprise needs. The operator outlined an organizational, technology, and culture overhaul to strengthen competitiveness across B2B AI. The company will scale its AI data center footprint by combining capabilities from SK Group affiliates and global partners. SK Telecom advanced its in-house foundation model to a second phase.

Samsung Taylor 2nm Fab Starts, Tesla AI Chips First

Samsung Taylor 2nm Fab Starts, Tesla AI Chips First
Samsung Electronics is accelerating its U.S. foundry strategy with the Taylor plant set to begin operations, anchored by 2-nanometer AI chips for Tesla’s next-generation self-driving platforms. After breaking ground in late 2022 with an initial $17 billion investment, Samsung’s Taylor fab is now holding its equipment installation ceremony and transitioning from build-out to run-up. For the U.S. semiconductor base, Taylor represents an advanced-node capacity point that complements Samsung’s existing Austin operations and expands domestic options beyond a single supplier. Tesla’s AI5 design has taped out, signaling it is ready for volume manufacturing, with AI6 following closely and expected to incorporate low-power DDR (LPDDR) memory to meet stringent automotive power budgets.

SK Telecom, Arm and Rebellions Launch Sovereign AI Inference Platform

SK Telecom, Arm and Rebellions Launch Sovereign AI Inference Platform
A new alliance between SK Telecom (SKT), Arm, and Rebellions targets the fast-growing AI inference market with a server platform designed for sovereign AI and telecom-grade data centers. SKT will validate a new AI server that combines Arm’s AGI CPU—its first Arm-designed data center processor, based on Neoverse CSS V3—with Rebellions’ RebelCard inference accelerator in live AI data center environments. The partners will co-develop the full software stack, from firmware up, and test telco-specific models and large-scale workloads, including SKT’s proprietary foundation model, A.X K1. Industry focus is shifting from training to inference at scale, where energy, latency, and total cost of ownership (TCO) are decisive.

FCC eyes ban on Chinese telco interconnection

FCC targets HKT: Section 214 revocation risk
The Federal Communications Commission is advancing a proceeding that would prohibit US carriers from interconnecting with Chinese state-linked operators and from using facilities they own or operate, including data centers and points of presence. The proposal targets interconnection at meet-me rooms, cross-connects, and handoffs that underpin IP transit, voice interconnect, SMS hubs, and enterprise backhaul. The Commission is seeking comment on a ban and will take the item to a vote at its 30 April Open Meeting. Depending on the final order, potential outcomes range from mandatory disconnection to forced divestiture or transfer of affected facilities.

Orange Drone Guardian: Nationwide drone detection

Orange Drone Guardian: Nationwide drone detection
Orange Business has launched Orange Drone Guardian, a counter‑UAS service that turns telco infrastructure into a nationwide sensing fabric—arriving as drone activity, regulation, and critical-infrastructure risk converge. Orange is leveraging assets few others can: secure nationwide connectivity, cloud qualified to ANSSI’s SecNumCloud 3.2 standard, a domestic security operations capability, and a tower footprint via TOTEM’s 19,700 sites across France. The offer combines sensors, command‑and‑control software, secure cloud, and managed operations in a subscription bundle designed to scale and evolve. Delivered as a subscription, customers gain real‑time situational awareness without large upfront capex.

SK Telecom ATHENA: AI-Native 6G Blueprint

SK Telecom ATHENA: AI-Native 6G Blueprint
SK Telecom introduced ATHENA—an architecture grounded in AI-native operations, Zero Trust security, hyper-connectivity, openness, and cloud-native design—to guide mid- to long-term evolution across RAN, core, transport, and network data platforms. The operator positions “AI for network” and “network for AI” as dual tracks: the former embeds AI into decision loops for autonomous optimization, while the latter tunes the network fabric to serve AI workloads efficiently. SK Telecom will showcase related technologies at MWC Barcelona 2026, including AI agents for networks, AI-RAN for combined connectivity and compute, device-side AI for antenna tuning, and integrated sensing-and-communications.

KDDI & Nokia: Quantum-Safe Optical Transport for AI DCI

KDDI & Nokia: Quantum-Safe Optical Transport for AI DCI
KDDI and Nokia validated quantum-safe optical transport at KDDI’s new Sakai Data Center, a facility built to support real-time AI training, inference, and analytics. The demonstration used Nokia’s 1830 Photonic Service Switch with C+L band capabilities for capacity scaling and the 1830 Security Management Server for centralized key and policy control. The goal is clear: deliver high-throughput, low-latency, and line-rate encrypted data center interconnect (DCI) that is resilient against both today’s threats and tomorrow’s quantum-era risks. Encrypting at the optical layer removes the performance penalties of application or IP-layer encryption and avoids fragmenting security by workload.

Ericsson and Mistral AI: Telco-Grade Network Automation

Ericsson and Mistral AI: Telco-Grade Network Automation
Ericsson and Mistral AI are aligning telecom-grade engineering with customizable foundation models to push AI deeper into network operations and RAN automation. The pairing marries Mistral AI’s fast-evolving model stack with Ericsson’s domain expertise across radio, cloud-native networking, and service management. For European operators, it signals a path to AI capabilities that respect data residency, security, and compliance expectations under the EU AI Act without ceding control to generic, hyperscaler-led platforms. The outcome operators want is simple: measurable gains in performance, efficiency, and resiliency with governance baked in.

India AI infrastructure investment: $200B bid by 2028

India AI infrastructure investment: $200B bid by 2028
India is moving to anchor a larger slice of global AI compute by pairing policy incentives with large-scale private capital and renewable power. New Delhi has outlined plans to attract more than $200 billion for AI infrastructure over the next two years, positioning the country as a production base for compute, data, and advanced applications rather than a pure consumer market. The policy stack aims to reduce friction for export-oriented AI services while widening access to shared compute for startups and enterprises. Adani Group plans to invest $100 billion through 2035 to build renewable-powered, AI-optimized data centers across India.

Blackstone backs Neysa with $1.2B for India AI infrastructure

Blackstone backs Neysa with $1.2B for India AI infrastructure
Blackstone will take a majority stake in Neysa through up to $600 million in primary equity, alongside Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset, and Nexus Venture Partners; the company also plans up to $600 million in debt to accelerate buildout. The raise is a step change from Neysa’s earlier $50 million and positions the Mumbai-headquartered startup to scale domestic GPU clusters for enterprises, public sector agencies, and AI developers.

India AI data city: Vizag 6GW compute hub

India AI data city: Vizag 6GW compute hub
The plan centers on Visakhapatnam, a port city on India’s east coast, as a tightly coupled zone for data centers, subsea cable landings, power, water, and the digital supply chain. State leadership wants the cluster to be more than rack space. It aims to bring in server assemblers, power and cooling vendors, and specialized logistics to create end-to-end capability. The city is also being pitched as a landing point for new subsea systems toward Singapore, which would diversify India’s international connectivity beyond Chennai and Mumbai and lower latency into Southeast Asia.
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