South Korea's biggest tech names are binding themselves to the artificial intelligence boom with a wave of enormous new deals.
Nvidia and SK Group announced a partnership worth more than $500 billion covering AI "factories" and next-generation memory, according to press materials from the two companies and reporting from CNBC, CNA and Investing.com. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Friday that the AI chip giant and SK Group would unveil business partnerships exceeding $500 billion, The Star reported.
A central piece is memory. According to CNBC, Nvidia is locking down supply of high-bandwidth memory from SK Hynix as part of the deal. High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, is an essential component for Nvidia's GPUs and systems, which means securing it helps guarantee Nvidia can keep building the hardware that powers AI.
The scope reaches beyond chips. NAVER, Nvidia and Brookfield plan a 200-megawatt expansion of what Quiver Quantitative and Yahoo Finance describe as "sovereign" AI factory infrastructure in Korea — data-center capacity a nation controls domestically.
The deals may be even larger across the industry. According to IBTimes Singapore, Samsung and SK Hynix signed $950 billion in AI chip and data-center agreements with Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and Broadcom during South Korean President Lee's visit to Silicon Valley.
Why it matters: memory chips have become the chokepoint of the AI buildout, and these agreements show Nvidia and its top customers racing to lock up scarce supply — and Korea positioning itself as a core supplier for the world's AI infrastructure.