SK Telecom (SKM) is trading higher as markets react to a fresh catalyst around its AI infrastructure strategy: an announced collaboration with Arm and AI chipmaker Rebellions aimed at building next-generation, low-power AI inference infrastructure for telecom and sovereign AI data center workloads. The partnership spotlights SK Telecom’s effort to expand beyond core wireless into AI data centers and AI services—an angle that has been driving incremental investor interest and helping lift the ADR.

The Arm–Rebellions tie-up is positioned around inference—running AI models efficiently—where power and total cost of ownership are increasingly important for data centers. The initiative targets an alternative path versus GPU-heavy stacks by pairing Arm CPU technology with Rebellions’ AI accelerators, which investors can interpret as a roadmap to differentiated AI data center offerings and potential new revenue streams for SK Telecom’s infrastructure business.

Beyond telecom fundamentals, SK Telecom has also been treated as an AI-adjacent proxy due to its minority stake in Anthropic. Ongoing market chatter around Anthropic’s valuation trajectory and potential IPO timing has amplified the perception of hidden asset value on SK Telecom’s balance sheet, contributing to periodic bursts of buying interest in both the Korea-listed shares and the U.S.-traded ADR.