Chey Tae-won, Jensen Huang announce sweeping AI partnership spanning chips to data centers

SK Group and Nvidia announced a sweeping partnership Monday covering AI semiconductor design and manufacturing through to the construction and operation of AI data centers.

Under the agreement, SK Hynix will jointly develop and supply next-generation AI memory chips to Nvidia, which will in turn provide its highest-performance AI superchips to SK Telecom to support the buildout of Asia's largest AI data center.

The alliance, which had previously centered on SK Hynix's memory chip supply, has now expanded to cover the full upstream and downstream scope of the AI business — a step analysts say elevates it to a new level.

For Nvidia, the deal secures a stable, long-term supply of memory from SK Hynix at a time when chip shortages have persisted, while also opening a new sales channel for its superchips through SK Telecom — further cementing what Nvidia envisions as its "AI universe."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described the announcement as a "big partnership," saying it covers "not only the semiconductor sector but also the telecom sector for building AI factories in Korea." He called it "the first case spanning multiple years, multiple platforms, technologies and various businesses across SK Group."

"We are witnessing enormous demand around the world for more AI factories, and business is booming," Huang said. "That is why we formed this partnership. We are just at the beginning of building AI infrastructure, and the future is incredibly bright."

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said the two companies would build AI factories together, explaining that the concept encompasses both SK Hynix's fabrication facilities and AI data centers. "A key part of this is that Nvidia and SK will jointly build an R&D roadmap so we can adapt more quickly to future demand," he said.

Chey added that while much of the past collaboration had focused on memory, "from now on we will elevate the partnership to the group level."

On the fourth day of his visit to South Korea, Huang joined Chey on Monday morning in the lobby of SK Seorin Building in Jongno-gu, Seoul, to announce the new AI partnership.

Also present were SK Hynix President Kwak Noh-jung, SK Telecom President Jeong Jae-heon, SK Telecom CTO Jeong Seok-geun, Nvidia Senior Vice President Jeff Fisher, and Madison Huang — Huang's eldest daughter and Nvidia's senior director of Omniverse and robotics marketing.

SK Hynix agreed to jointly develop and supply memory chips over the long term for four Nvidia products: the "Vera Rubin" AI supercomputer, the "Vera" CPU, the "RTX Spark" personal PC superchip and the "Jetson Thor" robotics computing platform.

These are the next-generation superchips Huang had earlier referred to as "four gifts for Korea." The agreement positions SK Hynix to enter new markets in step with Nvidia's AI superchip roadmap, spanning AI data centers, personal AI and physical AI.

"Our partnership will expand from AI supercomputers to CPUs, PCs and the very exciting field of robotics," Huang said. "SK Hynix will continue to be Nvidia's largest memory partner."

He added that Nvidia already purchases billions of dollars' worth of memory from SK Hynix each year and that the figure will grow. "In a sense, you can buy SK Hynix stock at a cheap price right now," he said.

At an earlier samgyeopsal dinner meeting, Huang had also alluded to memory supply constraints, saying Nvidia needs "more HBM" and large volumes of LPDDR5 low-power DRAM for the next-generation Vera CPU and the RTX Spark PC superchip.

On Monday he again underscored the importance of the alliance, saying every country and every company will need AI infrastructure and that AI startups worldwide are thriving. "That means demand for Nvidia computing is high, and demand for SK Hynix memory is high," he said.

SK Telecom and Nvidia are pushing ahead with plans to build a gigawatt-scale AI factory targeting first operation in 2027. The gigawatt-class AI factory is a next-generation data center built on Nvidia DSX-based infrastructure, going beyond the conventional data center concept limited to general-purpose computing and data storage.

SK Telecom will join Nvidia's "Nvidia Cloud Partner" global ecosystem for high-performance cloud AI services, aiming to achieve the lowest token costs and highest performance per watt. The company plans to grow beyond Korea into Asia's leading AI cloud provider.

SK Telecom plans to deploy Nvidia's latest superchip, Grace Blackwell, followed by the next-generation Vera Rubin superchip set for release in the second half of this year.

The two companies also agreed to deepen cooperation in physical AI and robotics. Technology SK Telecom has built on Nvidia's digital twin platform Omniverse is already being applied to SK Hynix's semiconductor manufacturing processes, and robot simulation capabilities are being further developed using Nvidia's robotics platform Cosmos.

"We are at the beginning of the AI revolution — that is why we are building AI factories," Huang said. "Korea has almost no AI infrastructure. We will start building it here together with SK Telecom."

Monday's meeting was the third time Huang and Chey have met during Huang's four-day visit to South Korea — following a samgyeopsal dinner on Friday, the first day of his trip, and a "kkanbuchicken dinner" on Sunday evening. The two have appeared together in public nearly every day, putting on a visible display of their companies' deepening AI partnership.