SK Telecom Q3 Operating Profit Surges Elevenfold, but AI Data Center Revenue Falls 7.4%

What happened

On Nov. 4, SK Telecom reported its third-quarter 2026 results: revenue of 4.4973 trillion won (up 13% year-on-year, up 3.2% quarter-on-quarter), operating profit of 552.3 billion won (surging 1,040% year-on-year but declining 2.4% quarter-on-quarter) and net profit of 411.8 billion won; operating profit has stayed above 500 billion won for the third consecutive quarter since the beginning of this year. The recovery partly reflected a low comparison base following the hacking incident in April 2025, when customer compensation and service-fee discounts pushed last year's third-quarter operating profit down to 48.4 billion won; compared with the third quarter of 2024 before the incident (533.3 billion won), this year's figure was about 3.6% higher, while revenue was 34.8 billion won lower than the 4.5321 trillion won recorded then. The focal point: AI data center revenue was 126.1 billion won, up 6.2% year-on-year but down 7.4% quarter-on-quarter from 136.2 billion won; the company explained that revenue grew on higher utilization rates at existing data centers and expanded submarine cable traffic, but a revenue gap emerged in its GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS) business during the transition to new long-term contracts. AI services revenue for enterprises and individual consumers reached 70 billion won, up 27% year-on-year and 14% quarter-on-quarter; combined AI data center and AI services revenue totaled 196.1 billion won, up 12% year-on-year but down 0.7% from 197.5 billion won in the previous quarter. Separately, in July the company established SK Hyper, a specialist in AI data center business development, and in August announced plans to separate SK Broadband's data center and submarine cable businesses into a new company, SK Horizon; it signed agreements to secure a total of 3.08 trillion won in investment for SK Horizon from KKR and a consortium of IMM Investment and Stonebridge, aiming to complete the separation and establish the new entity in the first quarter of 2027. During the quarter, SK Telecom and SK Broadband spent 461.4 billion won on capital expenditure, with an additional 148.6 billion won invested in SK Hyper's data center business development, totaling 610 billion won; the company plans to expand data center infrastructure capacity from the current 137 megawatts (MW) to more than 318 MW after 2030, building new data centers in Ulsan, the Seoul metropolitan area and other locations.

Impact and signal

Affected components and suppliers

Source and time

Source: The Elec · 11/4/2026 · View original source