NVIDIA Secures SK Hynix HBM Memory In $500B AI Infrastructure Deal

As global demand for AI compute continues to outpace available hardware, NVIDIA and South Korea’s SK Group have announced an expanded, multi-faceted partnership valued at over $500 billion. Formalized via letters of intent at an AI Summit in San Francisco, the overarching agreement spans multi-gigawatt AI factory construction and a long-term memory supply deal with SK hynix.

The centerpiece of the expanded infrastructure deal is SK Telecom, which will construct a massive 2-gigawatt AI cloud facility in South Korea. Built on NVIDIA’s full-stack DSX AI factory architecture, the multi-gigawatt data center will deploy NVIDIA’s next-generation Vera Rubin platforms running on SK hynix’s HBM4 memory modules. The first phase of this AI factory is slated to come online in 2027, delivering gigawatt-scale compute for enterprise, agentic AI, and physical AI workloads across the Asia-Pacific region.

While 2 gigawatts of cloud infrastructure is a big deal, the agreement builds directly on SK hynix's rollout of next-gen HBM4 memory to address a critical industry bottleneck in high-bandwidth memory availability. In particular, the demand for HBM is growing at a frenetic pace during this period of rapid factory expansions, with memory fab capacity limiting how fast companies can execute on their build-out roadmaps.

Under the long-term agreement, NVIDIA secures a stable supply pipeline of next-generation HBM for its Vera Rubin platform, as well as future architectures. In return, the two tech giants will jointly-engineer customized memory stacks tailored specifically to the bandwidth, power efficiency, and thermal demands of next-gen LLM training and real-time inference.

"In the AI era, competitiveness depends not just on how effectively AI is utilized, but on how much intelligence we can produce," said SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won. "By leveraging SK hynix’s AI memory and SK Telecom’s AI infrastructure capabilities, SK will collaborate with NVIDIA to build a world-class AI factory, helping Korea transcend its role as a leading adopter of AI and become a global hub that drives AI innovation."

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who recently joined X and immediately made a pitch for open-weight AI models, said South Korea is positioned to become a "global AI powerhouse." From his vantage point, this $500 billion deal that will bring more AI factories online "will power Korea's next wave of growth."