SK Telecom offers a buried Anthropic stake priced like a utility. The stake sits on its balance sheet at cost, and Anthropic's confidential IPO filing on June 1, targeting the second half, should force the market to mark it. Per @michaelsikand, SK Telecom has four times the next-best Anthropic exposure per dollar of market cap, and its core telco trades near 6.1x EV/EBITDA. It is still a proxy: foreign-listed, prone to conglomerate discounts, with a stake that is hard to mark precisely. x.com 

SK Telecom is worth getting into because its AI cloud plan and Anthropic stake are large relative to its $14B market cap. It already earns about $1B a year in operating income, and NVIDIA says SK Telecom plans a gigawatt-scale AI cloud in Korea on its DSX platform, with the first AI factory online in 2027. Its roughly 0.25% Anthropic stake would be worth about $4–4.5B at a $2T valuation after dilution, already 30% of its market cap. x.com  x.com 

SK Telecom shareholders may never see much of its Anthropic upside, because SKM sits inside the SK Group chaebol, run by a Chey family that favors the group over public holders. Proceeds could leak to affiliates through inflated intercompany contracts or be steered into group priorities, and Chairman Chey Tae-won's $1.1 billion divorce settlement gives him reason to keep value inside the group. ADR holders have no board seats, meaningful votes, real legal recourse or binding dividend policy. … Show more

SK Telecom could be a really good play heading into Anthropic's IPO. x.com 

SK Telecom is becoming Anthropic's Korean infrastructure partner, not just a holder of an Anthropic stake. Its $100 million 2023 investment is worth an estimated $2.7 billion, about 19% of its market cap, before any Anthropic IPO rerating. CEO Jung Jae-heon said SKT joined the Series H, won't sell, and that Anthropic is discussing compute with SKT. It joined Project Glasswing, and its gigawatt-scale Nvidia AI cloud starts in 2027. It trades at 6.1x EV/EBITDA versus 7.5-9x for Western peers. … Show more

SK Telecom pairs a defensive cash-cow telecom business with a second growth leg as Nvidia's primary Asian AI compute deployment partner. Nvidia announced a partnership with SK Telecom to build gigawatt-scale AI cloud infrastructure in Korea; its first AI factory, due in 2027, will not be full gigawatt scale at launch, but the story holds. Taking SK Broadband fully private gives it control of data center cash flows, while Korea's largest mobile share in mature 5G supplies stable cash. x.com 

SK Telecom combines a data center business, a stake in Anthropic and the potential turnaround of its legacy telecom business. x.com 

SK Telecom is the biggest winner from Anthropic cracking down on SPVs, because it is the cleanest public proxy for Anthropic exposure, with no SPV fees or legal issues and full liquidity. x.com 

SK Telecom offers the most Anthropic exposure per dollar of market cap, four times that of second-place Zoom, and CEO Jung Jae-heon confirmed it took part in Anthropic's Series H and has no plans to sell before the IPO. Excluding that stake, the core telco trades at about 6.1x EV/EBITDA, the cheapest in its global peer group. If Jensen Huang's bet on telecom as critical AI infrastructure pays off, SK Telecom's upside goes far beyond its early Anthropic bet. x.com 

An Anthropic IPO would force a market value onto SK Telecom's stake, which sits on its balance sheet at book value. SK Telecom invested $100M in 2023 at a $5B valuation and still holds roughly 0.3%, worth about $3B at a $1 trillion Anthropic against SK Telecom's roughly $15B market cap. If higher rumored valuations land, the stake becomes a meaningful fraction of the company, offering Anthropic exposure retail cannot otherwise buy, priced like a telco. x.com