South Korea's SK Group and Nvidia are expanding an AI infrastructure partnership that headlines put at more than $500 billion, according to reports from Moomoo, Telecompaper and The Fast Mode.
The deal covers two things that go together. The first is "AI factories" — the industry's term for data centers built specifically to train and run AI models, packed with Nvidia chips rather than the general-purpose servers that fill traditional facilities. The second is next-generation memory, specifically HBM, or high-bandwidth memory, according to TechPowerUp and eeNews Europe.
That memory piece is the part worth understanding. Nvidia's accelerators are only as fast as the data you can feed them, and HBM is the stacked, ultra-fast memory that does the feeding. SK Hynix, part of SK Group, is one of a small handful of companies in the world that can make it at scale. So this is less a customer-supplier arrangement than a mutual dependency: Nvidia needs the memory, SK needs the demand.
Investors noticed. TradingKey reported that South Korean chip stocks rose on the news — framing it as a $950 billion AI partnership — with the Kospi closing up nearly 1%, SK Hynix rebounding over 3% and Samsung also gaining.
Nvidia is not the only partner involved. The Fast Mode separately reported that SK is expanding AI infrastructure cooperation with Microsoft and other global big tech partners, suggesting a broader push to position South Korea as a hub for AI buildout rather than a single bilateral bet.
Why it matters: figures at this scale signal that the AI boom is shifting from software promises to physical construction — factories, memory and power — and that South Korea's chipmakers expect to be paid for supplying it.