SK Telecom's aircraft returns to Seoul as SK Group finalizes $500 billion AI deals

SK Telecom's Airbus A319-115X ACJ, tail number HL8080, was tracked departing Istanbul Atatürk Airport on July 31 and landing at Gimpo International Airport on August 1, a flight of just under ten hours. The aircraft, configured for corporate and delegation travel, had been operating in European airspace in the days prior, with positions logged near Sicily and the Balkans on July 28. As always, we track the plane, not the people — but the movement arrives at a moment of significant corporate activity.

If SK Telecom representatives were aboard, they would be returning to Seoul the same week SK Group announced a sweeping set of AI infrastructure partnerships in San Francisco. Per a report from The Korea Herald, SK Group and Nvidia unveiled more than $500 billion in planned cooperation, including the construction of up to 2 gigawatts of AI data centers powered by Nvidia's Vera Rubin GPU platform and SK Hynix's HBM4 memory. The Straits Times further reported that SK Telecom separately signed agreements with Anthropic and Amazon Web Services for gigawatt-scale AI data centers in South Korea, while SK Hynix deepened its long-term memory supply deal with Microsoft.