SK Telecom has unveiled its next-generation AI foundation model, 'A.X K2,' developed independently, and is launching an initiative to expand AI transformation across industries including manufacturing, defense, and biotechnology. On the 29th, SK Telecom announced that it has released 'A.X K2,' a model with 688 billion (688B) parameters, on the global open-source platform Hugging Face. By increasing the model size from last year's 519 billion (519B) 'A.X K1,' the company has strengthened capabilities in mathematical and scientific reasoning, Korean language knowledge, and long-form text comprehension. The average performance of A.X K2 across 14 domestic and international AI benchmarks improved by 32.2 percentage points compared to A.X K1. Evaluations related to long-form text understanding and AI agents showed an improvement of 83.9 percentage points. SK Telecom applied its proprietary 'SGA (Sparse Gated Attention)' architecture to selectively process only necessary information even in long contexts. The company stated that A.X K2 achieves performance levels comparable to recently released global AI models such as Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, DeepSeek V4-Flash, GLM-5.1, and Kimi K2.6. SK Telecom plans to apply A.X K2 across various industrial sectors including manufacturing, defense, and biotechnology.