According to South Korean media reports, South Korea's SK Telecom has entered the AI chip market in November 2020 by launching its own designed AI chip Sapeon X220. Currently, the company is looking to expand its AI chip business and expects to spin off its semiconductor business unit to Sapeon Korea in January 2022.
South Korean media "BusinessKorea" reported that SK Telecom said that the self-designed Sapeon X220 AI chip is 1.5 times faster than other GPUs in deep learning computing speed. SK Telecom applied the chip to NHN AI's services in June 2021. Sapeon Korea expects to partner with SK Hynix on memory-related technologies and outsource chip production to Taiwan's TSMC instead of South Korea's Samsung.
The report emphasized that since the artificial intelligence chip market is in a rapid growth trend, SK Telecom decided to create Sapeon Korea. Sapeon Korea will also compete with global chip-free IC giants such as NVIDIA and AMD for AI chips. According to the data of market research company Gartner, the global artificial intelligence chip market is expected to grow 3.6 times in 5 years, and the market sales amount will grow from about 14 trillion won in 2020 to about 50 trillion won in 2024.
And although SK Hynix is already a world-class memory semiconductor manufacturer. However, in order to get rid of the pressure of periodic memory cycles, SK Group is also working hard to expand its business areas into system semiconductors in order to achieve the goal of diversifying product sales.
(First image source: SK Telecom official website)
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