SK Group seals $750b AI memory, data center deals with global tech giants

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pose for a photo after signing a strategic AI factory and semiconductor cooperation MOU among SK Hynix, SK Telecom and Nvidia at an AI summit held at The Midway in San Francisco on Friday (local time), with President Lee Jae-myung in attendance. [Yonhap]

SK Group has agreed to cooperate with global technology companies, including Nvidia, on the long-term supply of advanced memory semiconductors worth $750 billion (about 1,095 trillion won) over the next five years. Beyond Nvidia, the group will also supply next-generation memory solutions to Microsoft. SK Telecom will expand its cooperation with Anthropic and Amazon Web Services in the AI data center sector.

SK Group announced Friday that it reached agreements on AI infrastructure cooperation — spanning AI semiconductors and AI data centers — with Nvidia, Microsoft and Anthropic at an AI summit held at The Midway in San Francisco. A separate meeting with AWS built on the partnership the two sides had developed through their joint construction of an AI data center in Ulsan.

SK Group had previously unveiled plans to invest in AI infrastructure — including building a nationwide network of AI data centers and developing a semiconductor belt in the Honam region — at a public briefing on what it calls its three mega-projects. The latest agreements with global technology companies are expected to strengthen the foundation for executing those plans. SK Group said it intends to use the partnerships to simultaneously advance South Korea's AI competitiveness and expand the global AI ecosystem.

"The expanded cooperation with global technology companies such as Nvidia again confirms that demand for AI infrastructure, including AI memory, is growing rapidly," an SK Group official said. "We expect this cooperation to give fresh momentum to the mega-projects the government recently announced."

Chey, Nvidia hold dinner on eve of AI summit

SK Group, Nvidia agree on cooperation worth over 730 trillion won

LOI covers AI factory construction through AI memory supply

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, and executives from SK Hynix, SK Telecom and Nvidia share a dinner in Woodside, California, on Thursday (local time), the day before the AI summit, reaffirming the long-standing partnership between the two sides. [Provided by Nvidia]

SK Group and Nvidia will pursue broad cooperation to build AI infrastructure worth more than $500 billion (about 730 trillion won). The two sides signed a letter of intent covering everything from AI factory construction to AI memory supply.

SK Hynix will enter into a long-term AI memory cooperation agreement with Nvidia. The deal follows an earlier long-term technology partnership and will allow Nvidia to secure a stable supply of next-generation AI memory while giving SK Hynix a broader foundation for growth in the AI memory business.

The two companies plan to jointly develop and optimize next-generation AI memory, including HBM, to meet infrastructure demand spanning large language model training, agentic AI and physical AI applications.

SK Telecom will receive next-generation GPUs and pursue investment cooperation to build what would be South Korea's largest AI factory, with a capacity of 2 GW. The agreement builds on plans the two companies reached in June to construct a gigawatt-scale AI factory in South Korea.

SK Telecom plans to deploy Nvidia's full-stack AI factory architecture, the DSX platform, alongside the next-generation AI computing system Vera Rubin — equipped with SK Hynix's sixth-generation HBM, HBM4 — and begin building out a high-performance AI factory in stages from 2027.

The strategy is to accelerate development of large-scale AI infrastructure covering sovereign, physical and agentic AI as well as enterprise AI services, and to jointly address growing AI demand across South Korea and the broader Asia-Pacific region.

The cooperation is expected to accelerate the spread of Nvidia-powered AI infrastructure and broaden customers' access to advanced cloud services. It will also allow SK Telecom to pursue large-scale AI infrastructure investment and expansion while opening cutting-edge AI infrastructure to a wider customer base.

"Korea has everything it needs to emerge as a global AI powerhouse — world-class networks, data center and semiconductor technology leadership, and a vast industrial base," Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said. "Nvidia will work with SK Telecom and SK Hynix to build a new generation of AI factories that will drive Korea's next wave of growth."

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said: "Competitiveness in the AI era goes beyond how well you use AI — it depends on how much intelligence you can create. Drawing on SK Telecom's AI infrastructure capabilities and SK Hynix's AI memory, SK will work with Nvidia to build world-class AI factories and help South Korea move beyond being a consumer of AI to becoming a global hub that drives AI innovation."

SK Hynix to supply new memory solutions to Microsoft

SK Telecom signs MOU with Anthropic on AI data center construction

AWS partnership to expand domestic AI infrastructure cooperation

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei pose for a photo after signing a letter of intent on large-scale AI data center cooperation between SK Telecom and Anthropic at the AI summit held at The Midway in San Francisco on Friday (local time), with President Lee Jae-myung in attendance. [Yonhap]

SK Hynix has agreed to pursue long-term memory supply cooperation with Microsoft. The two companies will supply server memory optimized for AI workloads to Microsoft's data centers over the medium to long term, in response to rapidly growing demand for AI services.

They plan to jointly identify memory solutions tailored to AI workload requirements, validate them in real server environments and establish new standards for AI server memory.

SK Telecom and Anthropic signed a comprehensive MOU to cooperate on building a gigawatt-scale AI data center in South Korea. Anthropic is set to participate in SK Telecom's domestic AI data center construction project, and the two sides will continue discussing specific terms of cooperation. The MOU deepens a relationship that began with SK Telecom's strategic investment in Anthropic in 2023, extending their long-term partnership into the AI infrastructure space.

With AWS, SK Telecom will expand the scope of its AI infrastructure cooperation, building on the partnership forged through their joint construction of an AI data center in Ulsan. The two companies plan to combine SK Telecom's domestic AI data center construction and operating capabilities with AWS's global cloud and AI technology and customer base to extend their business to key locations across South Korea, with a long-term goal of securing gigawatt-scale AI computing capacity.

Also on Friday, SK Group Chairman Chey and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met to exchange views on the direction of long-term cooperation in AI infrastructure. SK and OpenAI have been in ongoing discussions about cooperation on AI infrastructure, including memory, and have continued to strengthen their strategic partnership since signing an agreement last October covering memory supply and the establishment and operation of an AI data center in the southwestern part of the country.

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