SK Group, Nvidia elevate AI partnership beyond semiconductors

SK Group and Nvidia are taking their AI cooperation to a new level.

Their existing collaboration had centered on semiconductors — chiefly SK Hynix's HBM chips — but the partnership will now expand across the full spectrum of AI infrastructure, including the construction and operation of AI factories.

SK Group announced Monday that the two companies plan to jointly develop next-generation AI factory architecture, going beyond infrastructure buildout to pursue collaborative research.

The new R&D cooperation will include joint work on computing architecture designed to improve GPU and memory chip performance simultaneously from the design stage. The two companies plan to establish a joint consultative body to advance that effort.

SK Hynix will deepen a long-term technology partnership with Nvidia to accelerate semiconductor design and manufacturing, including co-developing next-generation memory chips for global AI factory construction. Through the partnership, SK Hynix will also enter new AI markets that Nvidia is pioneering — among them AI infrastructure, personal AI and physical AI.

The two companies plan to jointly develop memory chips for the Vera Rubin AI supercomputer, the Vera CPU, the RTX Spark PC and the Jetson Thor robotic computing platform.

SK Telecom will work with Nvidia to build AI-dedicated data centers and expand its cloud business.

SK Telecom said it will pursue construction of an AI factory — a data center purpose-built for AI training and inference workloads — based on Nvidia's AI infrastructure platform DSX.

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won made the announcement at a briefing held Monday morning at SK Seorin Building in Jongno-gu, Seoul, alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. "We will build the AI factories of the future together with Nvidia," Chey said. "Much of our cooperation until now has been primarily in memory chips, but from here on we will elevate the partnership to the group level."

He went on to say the two sides would "create and share an R&D roadmap developed with Nvidia so we can continue cooperating to adapt more quickly to future AI demand."

Huang said he is witnessing strong global demand for more AI factories and that business is booming. "That is why we formed this partnership," he said. "We are only at the beginning of building AI infrastructure, and the future is extraordinarily bright."