SK Telecom has developed AI acceleration solution and applied to the data center infrastructure of the company’s AI service NUGU.
AI acceleration solution called AIX (AI Inference Accelerator) increases AI service capacity by five times, said SK Telecom.
SK Telecom said it’s the first Korean technology company to deploy AI acceleration solution to a commercialized service.
SK Telecom’s AI acceleration solution improves AI computing speed, allowing AI service to reach more customers. Engineers can install AIX, a palm size, card-shaped accelerator, to the existing AI server inside NUGU’s data center infrastructure to enable 20 times faster computing of deep-learning technology.
SK Telecom said its AI Inference Accelerator can increase AI service capacity by about 5 times compared to the past without the need to build additional servers. It has 16 times better energy efficiency compared to the GPU-based acceleration solution. The AI solution helps in reducing the operating cost of data center infrastructure.
SK Telecom applied the country’s first AI service to devices including GPS navigation device, kids’ phone, set-top box and so forth. NUGU’s monthly active user base surpassed 3 million in the first quarter of this year from 110,000 users from last August.
According to a March report by U.S. market intelligence firm Tractica, the global AI chipset market is expected to worth $66 billion by 2025. Global technology firms such as NVIDIA, Google and Microsoft have been engaging in the development and commercialization of AI acceleration solution.
Following the successful commercialization of AI acceleration solution, SK Telecom aims to develop the next-generation model that can further enhance AI computing speed and energy efficiency with more application versatility, said Park Jin-hyo, EVP of ICT R&D Center at SK Telecom.
