NVIDIA and SK Group Announce $500 Billion AI Infrastructure Partnership

(WS News) – NVIDIA and South Korea’s SK Group have signed letters of intent for a partnership worth more than $500 billion, aimed at building out AI infrastructure across the Asia-Pacific region in what could become one of the largest AI investment commitments to date.

The centerpiece of the deal is a 2-gigawatt AI factory that SK Telecom will build in South Korea using NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin DSX computing platform, with the first phase expected to come online in 2027. The facility will run on high-bandwidth memory supplied by SK hynix, which has also entered into a long-term AI memory partnership with NVIDIA to secure supply and jointly develop next-generation memory technologies for large language model and agentic AI workloads. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won framed the initiative as a shift in competitive strategy, saying that in the AI era, competitiveness depends not just on how effectively AI is used but on how much intelligence a country or company can produce.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang disclosed the plan during a meeting in San Francisco with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, who was on the first day of a two-day trip focused on AI investment. Huang said South Korea has the networks, data centers, chip technology, and industrial scale to become a global AI powerhouse. The letters of intent describe the total scope of a three-pronged partnership spanning AI factory infrastructure, memory supply, and sovereign AI services, though the financial breakdown across SK Telecom, SK hynix, and the wider SK Group has not yet been disclosed.

The agreement builds on a broader South Korean AI push that also involves Samsung, Naver, Hyundai, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Broadcom, as the country positions itself as a key hub in the global AI supply chain. It comes as global data center investment is projected to approach $1.6 trillion by 2030, according to research firm Omdia, with tech giants expected to spend roughly $600 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone.