Nvidia and SK Group announced an expanded partnership valued at more than $500 billion on July 24 at an AI Summit in San Francisco, formalized via letters of intent spanning AI factory construction and long-term memory supply. The centerpiece is SK Telecom's planned 2-gigawatt AI data center in South Korea, built on Nvidia's DSX platform and deploying Vera Rubin accelerated computing powered by SK hynix HBM4 memory, with the first phase targeted for 2027.
Under the memory agreement, Nvidia secures a stable long-term HBM supply pipeline for Vera Rubin and future architectures, while the two companies will jointly engineer customized memory stacks tailored to next-generation training and inference workloads. "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, framing the deal as positioning Korea to become a global AI innovation hub rather than only an adopter.
The announcement also included a separate $1 billion Nvidia investment in Korean cloud provider Naver to expand its Sejong data center to 200 megawatts with roughly 100,000 Vera Rubin GPUs, and Hyundai Motor Group's plans to deploy 50,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs for robotics and autonomous vehicle applications. Much of the broader plan remains in early stages, with the first SK facility not due online until 2027, meaning firm equipment orders and deployment schedules are still to come.
