On July 25, 2026, SK Group and NVIDIA announced a comprehensive partnership valued at more than $500 billion, formalized through letters of intent signed during a San Francisco summit hosted by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung. The agreement spans two sides of the AI supply chain at once: building AI factories in Korea and supplying the high-bandwidth memory that global AI infrastructure depends on.
On the infrastructure side, SK Telecom plans to build a 2-gigawatt-scale AI cloud in Korea using the NVIDIA DSX full-stack AI factory architecture and NVIDIA Vera Rubin accelerated computing, with the first AI factory scheduled to come online in 2027. On the memory side, SK hynix will supply HBM4 chips for NVIDIA platforms and co-develop next-generation AI memory solutions, deepening a decades-long technology relationship between the two companies.
The structure of the deal is notable: the same conglomerate is now both a cornerstone supplier to NVIDIA (through SK hynix memory) and a cornerstone customer (through SK Telecom’s AI factory buildout). It also anchors South Korea’s bid to be a first-tier sovereign AI power rather than purely a component exporter, following the national AI factory pattern NVIDIA has established with Japan and other governments.
For business leaders, the announcement is another data point that AI infrastructure commitments have moved from tens of billions to hundreds of billions per deal, and that national governments are increasingly the convening force behind them.