Nvidia and SK Group announce $500B AI partnership

Nvidia ↗ 2.87% and South Korea's SK Group announced plans for a partnership valued at more than $500 billion on Thursday, encompassing large-scale AI data centers and next-generation memory development. The deal, signed as letters of intent at an AI Summit in San Francisco attended by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, marks one of the largest AI infrastructure commitments to date and cements SK Hynix as the dominant supplier of high-bandwidth memory for Nvidia's most advanced processors.investing+2

A Memory Lifeline for AI

The agreement formalizes and expands an earlier multiyear technology partnership between Nvidia and SK Hynix announced in June, under which the South Korean chipmaker committed to codeveloping memory for Nvidia's Vera Rubin AI supercomputers, Vera CPUs, and Jetson Thor robotic platforms. SK Hynix is already Nvidia's largest memory supplier, and CEO Jensen Huang has said the company purchases billions of dollars in products from it annually, a figure he expects to grow.investing+3

High-bandwidth memory, which stacks multiple chips to deliver the data-transfer speeds required by AI processors, has become a key bottleneck in the global AI supply chain. SK Hynix reported in late 2025 that it had completely sold out its 2026 chip production capacity. The new agreement is designed to align future memory output more closely with Nvidia's chip-development roadmap.benzinga+1

Data Centers and Cloud Ambitions

Under the expanded partnership, SK Telecom will build a two-gigawatt AI data center powered by Nvidia's Vera Rubin processors and SK Hynix's HBM4 memory, with the first facility scheduled to come online in 2027. This doubles a previous commitment by SK Telecom to construct a gigawatt-scale AI cloud in South Korea, and funding could involve global technology companies and overseas capital.reuters+1

In a separate announcement at the summit, Nvidia, Naver, and Brookfield Asset Management ↘ 1.70% outlined plans to expand Naver's AI data-center operations in South Korea.investing

Geopolitical Context

President Lee's visit to San Francisco — the start of an 11-day trip that will also take him to Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Germany — was organized around deepening U.S.-Korea cooperation on AI infrastructure. The summit drew the heads of Samsung, Hyundai, and other major Korean conglomerates alongside American tech executives.keia+3

The scale of the partnership signals that massive AI buildouts are expanding beyond a handful of U.S. hyperscalers to foreign governments and large industrial groups. "SK Hynix has been Nvidia's largest memory partner. SK Hynix will continue to be Nvidia's largest memory partner," Huang said, according to Reuters.reuters