이 기사는 2021년 12월 27일 08시01분 thebell에 표출된 기사입니다

South Korea’s top mobile carrier SK Telecom will strengthen its artificial intelligence (AI) chip business by spinning off the business unit.

The company held a board of directors meeting on Tuesday and decided to hand over its AI semiconductor business, worth about 31 billion won ($26 million), to a new affiliate, tentatively named SAPEON Korea. A business transfer agreement will be signed on January 4.

SK Telecom has decided to establish a new corporation in a bid to accelerate the commercialization of its AI chip technology and improve management efficiency. SAPEON Korea is expected to be launched as a subsidiary of SK Telecom, and its shareholding structure has yet to be determined. A possibility of attracting outside investors has not been ruled out.

“The newly created entity will focus on developing and commercializing AI semiconductors,” an official at SK Telecom said. “Its shareholding structure has not been finalized yet as the board just approved the plan.”

SAPEON Korea will be a fabless company, which will need a foundry firm to handle the manufacturing. SK Telecom last year assigned its AI chip SAPEON X220 to Taiwan’s pure-play foundry TSMC. A foundry firm has not been selected for its next model to be developed, and the collaboration with affiliate SK hynix is also an option.

SK Telecom has developed its own AI accelerator SAPEON by setting up its Loonshot Task Force. SAPEON X220 is optimally designed to process AI tasks faster, using less power by efficiently processing large amounts of data in parallel. Its deep learning computation speed is 1.5 times faster than that of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for inference that are being widely used by AI-service companies. At the same time, it uses 20% less power than GPU by consuming 60 watts of energy and is about half the price of a GPU.

Global tech giants like Apple, Alphabet, and Microsoft are already stepping up efforts to develop their AI chips. SK Telecom’s creation of its AI chip subsidiary is a move seen as part of its plan to become a big tech firm by providing subscription, metaverse, AI, and digital infra services. (Reporting by Jang-jun Lee)