SK Telecom’s AI unit offers staff voluntary retirement program just weeks after launch (techcrunch.com)

SK Telecom’s newly formed AI division, AI CIC, is offering staff a voluntary retirement program just weeks after its late-September launch as part of a wider consolidation of the company’s AI activities. The program — reportedly communicated to employees at all levels within the roughly 1,000-person unit — is presented as supportive rather than a forced downsizing; staff who remain may be reassigned or relocated. The AI CIC will centralize SKT’s personal AI agent “A.”, AI data center operations, enterprise AI business, and global partnerships and investments, while streamlining overlapping roles across existing teams. For the AI/ML community, the move signals SK Telecom’s shift from fragmented pockets of R&D to a single, revenue-driven AI organization targeting ₩5 trillion (~$3.5B) in annual revenue by 2030. Technically, SKT is doubling down on infrastructure, recently offering Nvidia Blackwell GPUs-as-a-service and partnering with OpenAI on the “Stargate Korea” data-center initiative — choices that underline an emphasis on large-model training/inference capacity, enterprise AI services, and regional data sovereignty. The voluntary exits could accelerate talent reshuffling and impact project timelines, but the infrastructure bets position SKT to compete as a local AI cloud and services provider.