SK Telecom has hit successive "jackpots" with investments in artificial intelligence (AI) corporations. The book value of its equity in the U.S. firm Anthropic, into which it invested about 270 billion won starting in 2023, surpassed 3.5 trillion won at the end of June. The book value of the remaining equity in MakinaRocks, a domestic physical AI corporation invested in 2018, has also swelled to more than 20 times its acquisition cost.
◇ MakinaRocks remaining equity, value more than 20 times the acquisition cost
On the 25th, a ChosunBiz analysis of SK Telecom's semiannual report found that the book value of 576,000 MakinaRocks shares held by the company stood at 9.642 billion won as of the end of June this year. The acquisition cost of the equity was 450 million won, making the book value about 21.4 times the principal. The equity valuation gain is 9.192 billion won.
MakinaRocks is a spin-out corporation established in 2018 by researchers who had been developing manufacturing-specialized AI technology at SK Telecom. SK Telecom invested 900 million won at the time of its founding and secured 1,152,000 shares. MakinaRocks has since grown into a physical AI corporation supplying AI operating systems to the manufacturing and defense sectors, and it entered the KOSDAQ market in May.
SK Telecom disposed of half of its equity holdings—576,000 shares—during the first half of this year. The sale amount was not disclosed. The company plans to reinvest funds secured from the equity sale back into AI while continuing cooperation with MakinaRocks in physical AI and Robotics.
Its Anthropic investment generated valuation gains in the trillion-won range. SK Telecom invested about 130 billion won in 2023 and added roughly 140 billion won in the first half of this year. The cumulative investment totals about 270 billion won. The book value of SK Telecom's equity in Anthropic surged from 1.3762 trillion won at the end of last year to 3.505 trillion won at the end of June this year. That is about 12.9 times the cumulative investment.
◇ Invest, partner, cash out, reinvest… SKT aims for a virtuous AI cycle
Investments in the two corporations are the result of SK Telecom's yearslong strategy to secure a lead in AI corporations. Rather than developing every technology in-house, it secures equity in promising corporations and incorporates their technologies into its own services and infrastructure businesses. Targets range widely from AI-based models to search and agents, video understanding, enterprise AI, physical AI, and graphics processing unit (GPU) cloud.
A representative case is AI search corporation Perplexity. SK Telecom invested $10 million (about 13.8 billion won) in the company and applied its search technology to the AI personal assistant "adot." It invested $3 million (about 4.2 billion won) in the video understanding AI corporation Twelve Labs. It also invested 15 billion won in Scatter Lab and 5.4 billion won in Allganize, respectively. It invested in the GPU cloud corporation Lambda as well, creating links with the AI data center business.
It is also working to bind portfolio corporations into a single ecosystem. Centered on its portfolio corporations, SK Telecom launched the "K-AI Alliance" in 2023, and the number of participating corporations grew to 50 this year. Starting this year, it introduced an in-house company (CIC) system that separately oversees telecom and AI businesses to strengthen the independence and execution of its AI operations.
SK Telecom is expanding technological cooperation with portfolio corporations into a groupwide AI infrastructure strategy. By connecting SK hynix's high bandwidth memory (HBM), SK ecoplant's data center construction capabilities, and the energy affiliates' power infrastructure, it plans to build an "AI full stack" spanning from semiconductors to data centers and AI services. In the second quarter of this year, SK Telecom's AI data center revenue rose 92.5% on-year to 136.2 billion won.
◇ An AI investment play different from KT and LG Uplus… the key is synergy with the core business
KT and LG Uplus are also pouring significant resources into AI, but their capital deployment methods differ. KT is placing emphasis on a roughly 2.4 trillion won, five-year AI and cloud collaboration signed with Microsoft. LG Uplus is expanding around the Paju AI data center, into which it is investing about 2 trillion won, and the AI call agent "ixi-O."
While KT and LG Uplus are more directly investing in infrastructure and services, SK Telecom has sought both capital gains and business collaboration by securing equity early in promising AI corporations. Given that it made additional investments in Anthropic while partially disposing of MakinaRocks equity, it is seen as a "two-track" strategy that combines further investment in core corporations with partial recovery of invested funds.
The approach is to expand investments in corporations with high growth potential and to recoup some funds from those whose valuations have risen, then reinvest in new AI corporations. The aim is to build a cycle linking sourcing and investing, technological cooperation, recovery, and reinvestment.
The key is how deeply the portfolio corporations' technologies are integrated into adot, AI data centers, and enterprise AI to translate into actual revenue and profit. The ultimate value of this investment jackpot will be determined accordingly.