KT and SK Telecom are pursuing sharply different AI investment strategies. SK Telecom, selected for the South Korean government’s Sovereign AI Foundation Model project, increased both R&D spending and its R&D-to-revenue ratio in the first half of 2026. KT, which was not selected for the project’s elite team, cut R&D spending by 28.2% year over year while expanding its use of Microsoft AI and cloud technologies. KT’s R&D spending fell from 193.249 billion won ($143.0 million) to 138.793 billion won ($102.7 million), and its ratio declined from 1.35% to 1.03%. LG Uplus’s R&D spending fell 3.7% to 71.4 billion won ($52.8 million), while its ratio slipped from 0.98% to 0.95%. SK Telecom was the only carrier to increase both measures, raising spending 2.5% to 186.8 billion won ($138.2 million) and its ratio from 2.07% to 2.13%. KT’s first-half spending represented 39.1% of its 2025 full-year total, compared with 52.5% for SK Telecom and 48.8% for LG Uplus. During the same period, KT Cloud’s contract for providing and operating Microsoft Azure services rose 9.6% to 174.1 billion won ($128.8 million) from 158.9 billion won. The figures cannot be directly compared because R&D expenses and technology-use contracts have different accounting characteristics, and the R&D reduction cannot definitively be attributed to Microsoft. Still, the divergence suggests KT may be emphasizing externally sourced technology to accelerate AX commercialization, leaving it to demonstrate that the approach can build proprietary services, talent and technology capabilities.