NVIDIA and SK Group announce $500 billion-plus AI infrastructure partnership in South Korea

NVIDIA and SK Group unveiled a partnership worth more than $500 billion to build out AI infrastructure across South Korea, one of several major deals NVIDIA struck at the country's AI Summit this week alongside Hyundai, Naver, and Seoul National University.

What's new

NVIDIA's blog post on the summit states plainly: "SK Group and NVIDIA today announced plans for a $500-billion-plus comprehensive partnership to establish AI infrastructure." The buildout centers on next-generation silicon and memory: "the expanded collaboration will deploy NVIDIA Vera Rubin infrastructure powered by SK hynix HBM4 memory."

The SK deal was the headline item in a broader slate of Korea announcements NVIDIA made at the summit:

• SK Group — $500B+ comprehensive partnership deploying NVIDIA Vera Rubin systems with SK hynix HBM4 memory for AI infrastructure across the country.
• NAVER and Brookfield — an expansion of the NAVER-NVIDIA DSX AI factory at the GAK Sejong data center to 200 megawatts, roughly 100,000 GPUs worth of capacity.
• Hyundai Motor Group — a physical AI strategy built on 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, paired with NVIDIA's DRIVE Hyperion autonomous vehicle platform.
• KAIST — a joint AI research lab focused on agentic AI, based at the Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI in Seoul (announced separately).
• Seoul National University — plans for an NVIDIA AI Technology Center spanning foundation models, accelerated computing, and physical AI research.

Context

South Korea has been pushing to position itself as a top-tier AI infrastructure hub, leaning on its existing semiconductor strength — SK hynix is one of the world's largest memory chipmakers — to attract compute investment rather than simply importing it. NVIDIA framed the summit's ambition directly: "South Korea isn't merely going to participate in the AI revolution. It's aiming to be one of its key engines."

The SK partnership builds on NVIDIA's existing ties to the conglomerate, which spans chipmaking (SK hynix), telecom (SK Telecom), and energy — giving NVIDIA a single counterparty that can supply both memory silicon and downstream infrastructure buildout in the same deal.

Why it matters

At $500 billion-plus, this is one of the largest single-country AI infrastructure commitments disclosed to date, and it lands the same week NVIDIA separately announced a $300 million joint research lab with KAIST — signaling South Korea is becoming a coordinated, multi-front NVIDIA build-out rather than a series of one-off deals. Pairing compute (Vera Rubin GPUs) with memory supply (SK hynix HBM4) inside one partnership also underscores how tightly AI infrastructure economics are now bound to memory availability, a bottleneck that has repeatedly constrained data center buildouts industry-wide. For SK Group, the deal cements its position as a compute and memory supplier at a scale few other conglomerates can match.