TLDR
- Nvidia announced a gigawatt-scale AI cloud project in South Korea with SK Telecom, with the first AI factory planned for 2027.
- Nvidia and SK hynix signed a multi-year memory chip partnership to address global AI infrastructure supply shortages.
- Naver will expand sovereign AI infrastructure using Nvidia’s DSX platform, starting at 55 megawatts with plans to scale to gigawatt level.
- Nvidia also announced AI collaborations with Doosan Group focused on robotics.
- The deals came after CEO Jensen Huang spent the weekend in Seoul meeting tech leaders and appearing on a popular TV show.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang flew into Seoul on Friday promising “surprises,” and he delivered. Over the course of a weekend that included Korean barbecue and a TV appearance, Huang locked in a string of AI infrastructure deals that span cloud, memory chips, and robotics.
The biggest headline is the tie-up between Nvidia and SK Telecom. The two companies plan to build a gigawatt-scale AI cloud in Korea, with the first AI factory expected to come online in 2027. The project is described as supporting “sovereign, physical and agentic AI services” for Korean enterprises, with ambitions to expand across Asia. No investment figure was disclosed.
Memory Chips in Focus
SK hynix, which sits under the same SK Group umbrella as SK Telecom, also announced a separate “multi-year technology partnership” with Nvidia. The deal is centered on advanced memory components — the kind needed to run AI systems at scale, and currently in short supply globally.
The partnership covers co-development of memory for Nvidia hardware across AI infrastructure, personal AI, and physical AI markets. SK Group chair Chey Tae-won recently vowed to double silicon wafer production capacity, though he has also warned that chip shortages could persist until 2030.
Huang himself made the supply issue hard to miss. At the Computex trade show in Taipei last week, he signed a memory chip display at the SK hynix booth with the words: “Please make more.”
Nvidia’s market cap has crossed $5 trillion — more than the GDP of Japan or India — as governments and companies pour hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure.
Naver and Doosan Join the List
Beyond the SK deals, Nvidia announced an AI infrastructure expansion with Korean internet giant Naver. Naver will use Nvidia’s DSX platform to build and scale full-stack AI platforms, starting at 55 megawatts with a stated goal of reaching gigawatt scale.
“Useful AI has arrived, and demand for AI factories is extraordinary,” Huang said in a statement tied to the Naver deal.
Nvidia also announced a robotics-focused collaboration with Doosan Group, rounding out what became a busy Monday in Seoul.
The week before the South Korea trip, Nvidia unveiled a powerful new laptop chip for Windows machines aimed at the consumer AI PC market.
Naver’s infrastructure expansion using the Nvidia DSX platform marks one of the more concrete commitments to come out of the Seoul visit, with a defined starting capacity and a clear scale-up roadmap already in place.
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