SK Telecom Deepens US AI Bet With $480M Chip Investment as Anthropic Nears $965B IPO

SK Telecom, the South Korean telecom giant, announced Thursday it will invest 738 billion Korean won, or about $480 million, into SK Hynix NAND Product Solutions, a US based subsidiary of memory chip maker SK Hynix. The move deepens the operator's aggressive expansion into US AI infrastructure.

SK Telecom will take a 0.9% stake in the subsidiary, which SK Hynix established in January with a $10 billion investment alongside US flash memory firm Solidigm. Other SK Group affiliates, SK Inc. and SK Innovation, have already contributed $250 million and $380 million respectively.

Telco's AI portfolio now spans chips, models and simulated testing

SK Telecom's AI investments extend far beyond memory chips. The company holds a $100 million stake in Anthropic, taken in 2023, that is now valued at roughly $2.5 billion. Anthropic is preparing for an IPO next year that could value the company at $965 billion, according to Light Reading. Set against SK Telecom's own market cap of around $13 billion, the Anthropic holding alone represents one of the most profitable telco AI bets on record.

• SK Hynix has filed for a record American Depositary Receipts IPO worth an estimated $29 billion, capitalizing on a 294% stock surge this year driven by demand for advanced memory chips used in Nvidia GPUs.
• Patronus AI raised $50 million in Series B funding to build simulated environments where AI agents can be stress tested before deployment, borrowing a safety approach from Waymo's autonomous vehicle testing.
• Grid planners and utilities are rewriting interconnection and reliability playbooks as AI data center demand outruns decades of planning.

Anthropic warns of economic shock as AI replaces junior roles

Anthropic has stated it no longer needs junior software engineers, thanks to AI tooling, and warned that other industries will face a similar economic shock as automation replaces entry level cognitive work. The company said the "returns on intuition" have shifted, reducing the value of human troubleshooting in favor of machine learned pattern recognition.

The convergence of these trends is reshaping the investment landscape. SK Telecom's strategy mirrors a broader push by the SK Group to become a full stack AI supplier covering chips, infrastructure, platforms and energy. SK Hynix aims to turn its US operations into an AI solutions hub, expanding beyond memory into data centers and systems.

What comes next is a test of whether telco led AI investments can sustain their momentum. SK Telecom's $2.5 billion paper gain on Anthropic depends on the IPO delivering at a $965 billion valuation. Patronus AI must prove its simulation technology can prevent costly agent failures before they reach production. And as Anthropic itself demonstrates, the very AI being invested in could eliminate the jobs of those building it, creating a paradox that the industry has yet to resolve.