Samsung Wins Korea AI RAN Roles With KT and SK Telecom

Samsung secured a strategic role in Korea's national AI-networking push, signing contracts with both KT and SK Telecom for AI RAN (radio access network) projects under the Ministry of Science and ICT's 'Hyper AI Network' initiative. Samsung will act as sole global vendor for KT and main vendor for SK Telecom — a strong position in a program designed to embed AI into telecom infrastructure.

Beginning October 2026, the projects will deploy 5G Standalone private networks across industrial settings including shipyards and petrochemical facilities, using these demanding environments to validate AI RAN capabilities in the field. AI RAN — applying machine learning to optimize radio resource management, energy efficiency, and network performance — is an emerging category that networking vendors (Samsung, Ericsson, Nokia) and chipmakers (NVIDIA, with its AI-RAN initiatives) are all courting.

For Samsung, the wins reinforce its telecom-equipment business and its broader ambition to be a full-stack player spanning chips, devices, networks, and AI. The deals also fit the week's sovereignty-and-infrastructure theme: like AWS's NATO approval and Cohere's sovereign-AI deals, this is about national capability-building, here explicitly government-sponsored through the Hyper AI Network program. The industrial pilot sites are telling — shipyards and petrochemical plants are exactly the kind of high-value, connectivity-hungry environments where private 5G plus AI optimization can demonstrate measurable ROI. The near-term significance is modest (validation deployments, not nationwide rollout), but strategically it entrenches Samsung in Korea's AI-infrastructure roadmap and gives it reference deployments to pitch globally as AI RAN moves from concept toward commercial reality.