After SpaceX, could Anthropic be SK Telecom's next jackpot?

SK Telecom, which struggled with the fallout from a cyberattack last year, is being reappraised as an AI-linked stock. Analysts say the company's stake in Anthropic — valued at around 4 trillion won ($2.59 billion) — could be reflected in its share price as the AI firm moves toward an initial public offering, with expectations for data center and physical AI infrastructure expansion compounding the optimism alongside hopes for a recovery in core earnings.

Industry sources said Friday that markets are paying close attention to SK Telecom's Anthropic stake as the listing process is expected to advance in the second half of this year. Anthropic is a US generative AI company that developed the "Claude" chatbot. It raised $65 billion in a Series H funding round in May, earning a post-money valuation of $965 billion. This month, it filed confidential IPO documents with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

SK Telecom invested $100 million in Anthropic in 2023 and has continued AI platform cooperation with the company, including developing a large language model tailored for telecommunications. Its Anthropic stake is currently valued at around 4 trillion won.

"SK Telecom is the only listed company in Korea that holds a stake in Anthropic," said Jang Chi-young, an analyst at Hana Securities. "With the stake value representing 18 percent of market capitalization, the share price will be highly sensitive to the IPO event." Hana Securities estimates SK Telecom's Anthropic stake at 0.3 percent, with an assessed value of $2.9 billion (about 4.35 trillion won), equivalent to 17.3 percent of the company's market cap.

As Anthropic's mega-IPO — expected to follow SpaceX's in scale — approaches, the market is focusing less on the raw stake percentage and more on the ratio of stake value to market cap. "The pattern shows that the larger the stake value relative to a holding company's market cap, the greater the share price gain," Jang said. "During the SpaceX listing process, Mirae Asset Venture Investment and Mirae Asset Securities, which had high stake-to-market-cap ratios, surged as much as 568 percent and 298 percent respectively at their peaks, while Alphabet, whose stake was small relative to its market cap, saw a gain limited to 25 percent."

However, much of the optimism around Anthropic has already been priced in. SK Telecom's shares have surged more than 10 percent in stretches this year as the Anthropic stake was revalued. "For stocks that rose because of a stake holding, the peak tended to cluster just before the prospectus was made public," Jang said. "The reappraisal was in effect complete about three to five weeks before the listing date."

Expectations for a partnership with Nvidia — which drove two consecutive days of more than 10 percent share price gains earlier this month — have positioned SK Telecom not only as an AI stake-holding stock but also as an AI infrastructure play. The shares surged after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang introduced SK Telecom as a key partner in manufacturing and physical AI during his keynote at GTC Taipei in Taiwan. Investor sentiment was further lifted when a case study emerged showing SK Telecom had applied digital twin technology to SK Hynix's semiconductor manufacturing processes using Nvidia Omniverse, reinforcing the view that SK Telecom actively deploys AI in industrial settings.

Expectations for a recovery in core earnings also underpin the reappraisal. "Second-quarter consolidated operating profit is forecast at 532.8 billion won, up 57.5 percent year-on-year, broadly in line with consensus and our previous estimate," said Kim Tae-hyun, an analyst at IBK Investment Securities. "Since last year's distribution network loss compensation and SIM card replacement costs were booked as one-time expenses, operating profit is set to rise sharply."