During South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s visit to San Francisco, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed a landmark $500 billion partnership with SK Group, owner of memory giant SK Hynix. The deal, announced alongside a broader set of agreements, aims to secure a stable supply of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) – a critical component for AI accelerators – and deepens technological ties between the two nations.
President Lee met with top US tech leaders including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Broadcom’s Hock Tan. The main focus was Korea’s support for AI infrastructure and its dominance in HBM chips, where Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together hold roughly 80% of the global market. The pacts include long-term supply contracts, strategic partnerships, and memorandums of understanding, with US companies also expected to announce AI data center investments.
Huang stated the SK Group collaboration is part of a wider blueprint: Nvidia plans to transfer top AI researchers to South Korea, invest in Naver, work with Hyundai on autonomous Genesis cars, and partner with KAIST on a Korean large language model. “This is a golden age for South Korea,” Huang said, citing Nvidia’s existing cooperation with Samsung and SK Hynix.
The announcement comes as industry forecasts project global data center investment will approach $1.6 trillion by 2030, and tech giants may spend $600 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone. Nvidia’s move ensures a reliable memory supply as it expands beyond GPUs into rack-scale AI systems and custom CPUs, while also positioning South Korea as a cornerstone of the AI supply chain.
