TL;DR
Nvidia invests $1 billion in Naver and forms a $500 billion commercial partnership with SK Group, which includes data centers and memory chips.
Nvidia will invest $1 billion in South Korean internet company Naver to fund an artificial intelligence data center under construction in South Korea. The financing will allow Naver to more than triple the size of the facility, from 55 megawatts to 200 megawatts, with US private equity firm Brookfield agreeing to a non-binding term report for up to $9 billion in financing for the project. The site will run on Nvidia’s AI computing hardware.
Separately, Nvidia announced a long-term commercial partnership with SK Group, which is valued at more than $500 billion. That figure includes money Nvidia will spend on the purchase of memory chips from SK Hynix, the world’s largest high-bandwidth memory supplier, as well as purchases of SK Group Nvidia supercomputers. SK Telecom will build more than 2 gigawatts of AI data centers on the Korean peninsula, with the first facility set to open next year.
The announcements coincide with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s visit to Silicon Valley, and additional technology deals are reportedly in the works between Korean and American companies. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang said about it Bloomberg TV South Korea’s “golden age,” points to the country’s fast-growing semiconductor and industrial business as a reason to invest. Nvidia will also help SK Hynix design future high-throughput memory chips, which will strive to provide access to a component that has been in short supply due to the global deployment of AI data centers.
Korean deals are the latest year-round investment frenzy Nvidia has invested more than $40 billion in AI stock positions, including $30 billion in OpenAI. Earlier this week, the chipmaker signed a separate deal with Amkor Technology to bolster its chip packaging and recently completed a trip to Japan that included deals with Toyota and Japanese robotics firms. Critics have described the pattern as crowdfunding, where Nvidia invests in companies and then buys its hardware. a structure replicated by the chipmaker with data center operators, neoclouds and now sovereign AI partners.
For South Korea, the deals are a bet that its semiconductor industry can remain central to the AI architecture even as geopolitical tensions reshape chip supply chains. Samsung and SK Hynix are the only two companies in the world capable of producing the advanced memory chips required by Nvidia processors, and entering into a design partnership with Nvidia gives SK Hynix a structural advantage over its rival. Huang argued that each country should build its own sovereign AI capability, and that South Korea is best positioned to do so with its expertise in chip manufacturing and wealth of engineering talent.
