SK Telecom spins off AI data centers as KKR-backed SK Horizon
The AI build-out kept extending past the models themselves today: SK Telecom carved its data centers into a dedicated investment vehicle backed by KKR, while Kioxia moved to add a third Japanese fabrication plant for AI-driven memory demand. Two bets on the physical infrastructure underneath the boom.
SK Telecom announced it will spin off its data-center business into a new company called SK Horizon, bringing in a combined 3.08 trillion won (about $2.3 billion) of equity from KKR and a consortium led by South Korea's IMM Investment. Upon completion of the deal, KKR will hold a 29% stake and the IMM Investment–Stonebridge Capital consortium 20%, leaving SK Telecom with 51%, management control, and a clear separation between an AI-infrastructure unit and the rest of the telecom group. SK Horizon starts with 318 MW of operating capacity across eight existing sites in Seoul and its suburbs, plus the Ulsan and Guro facilities now under construction, and it also owns the submarine-cable network supplying overseas AI workloads.
The restructuring is the clearest sign yet that South Korea is treating AI data centers as strategic national infrastructure rather than a side business. SK Telecom is stacking SK Horizon (build and run) alongside SK Hyper (net-new projects), targeting 5 GW of phased capacity by 2029 and 15 GW by 2035, with the capital — and the valuation signal — coming squarely from global infrastructure money like KKR, which has more than $70 billion invested across digital and power assets. South Korea lacks the cheap domestic power and land that the US and parts of Asia enjoy, so cheap money from institutions betting on the AI build-out is what underwrites the ambition. The spin-off is expected to complete in the first quarter of next year, pending shareholder and regulatory approval.
Kioxia Holdings said it will build a new chipmaking plant in northern Japan, its third facility in Iwate Prefecture, in partnership with SanDisk to meet surging AI demand for memory storage. The move is a direct answer to the global NAND crunch that has been pushing up the cost of electronics, as AI training and inference require ever-larger pools of high-density flash. Kioxia is also racing to close the gap with rivals — the aggressive capacity push follows a period in which it lost ground to YMTC in NAND — and the new fab signals that memory makers see the AI storage shortage as durable enough to justify multi-year chip-plant construction. For anyone watching the AI supply chain, this is the demand for compute spilling into the storage layer: frontiers labs are hungry for more than just GPUs.
Do you think state-supported AI data centers will become the next stage of the global race — and how much is too much to spend? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: SK Telecom (PR Newswire) · Seoul Economic Daily · Data Center Dynamics · The Japan Times · Bloomberg
