SK Group and Nvidia announced a partnership valued at more than $500 billion to build AI infrastructure across South Korea, unveiled July 24 at an AI Summit in San Francisco after SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met for dinner the previous evening in Woodside, California.
The centerpiece is a 2-gigawatt AI Cloud data center that SK Telecom will build using Nvidia's DSX platform and Vera Rubin accelerated computing, powered by SK hynix's HBM4 memory. The first facility is scheduled to come online in 2027. Separately, SK hynix signed a long-term AI memory partnership with Nvidia covering the codevelopment of next-generation memory for large language model training, agentic AI and physical AI — an expansion of the narrower Nvidia-SK hynix memory pact the two companies signed in June.
"In the AI era, competitiveness depends not just on how effectively AI is utilized, but on how much intelligence we can produce," Chey said. Huang said "South Korea has all the ingredients to become a global AI powerhouse — world-class networks and data centers, leadership in chip technology and vast industrial scale."
The announcement extends beyond SK Group. Nvidia, Naver and Brookfield separately proposed expanding Naver's sovereign AI data center in South Korea from 55 megawatts to 200 megawatts, with Nvidia investing $1 billion directly into Naver and Brookfield entering a nonbinding term sheet to fund up to $9 billion of the buildout. The moves come weeks after SK hynix, Nvidia's top supplier of high-bandwidth memory, raised roughly $28 billion in its first Nasdaq listing, an offering that ran more than seven times oversubscribed. Nvidia also announced new AI research partnerships with KAIST and Seoul National University at the same summit.
Nvidia has now paired the SK Group deal with a second direct stake in a Korean data-center operator this year, alongside the $1 trillion order book Nvidia reported at its March GTC conference.
Nvidia is separately in talks to guarantee $250 billion in financing for OpenAI's Ohio data center, a similarly outsized bet on a single AI infrastructure project.
Source: GlobeNewswire, NVIDIA Blog, GlobeNewswire (Naver)
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