Nvidia said Friday it had secured artificial-intelligence memory supply from South Korea's SK Hynix in an agreement that could be worth $500 billion over a number of years, and Samsung Electronics separately signed a $200 billion memorandum of understanding with Broadcom on memory and foundry collaboration, both unveiled at an AI summit in San Francisco attended by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.
The pair of deals pushes the artificial-intelligence infrastructure buildout beyond the handful of American hyperscalers that have dominated the trade, drawing foreign conglomerates and their governments directly into a race for high-bandwidth memory and data-center capacity that has already left the global supply short.
Nvidia and SK Hynix
The SK Hynix agreement includes construction of large-scale data centers Nvidia expects to come online in 2027. SK Hynix affiliate SK Telecom will build a cloud business using Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems, targeting enough capacity to require two gigawatts of power, an amount Nvidia said indicates a buildout involving hundreds of thousands of graphics processing units.
"The expansion will include a co-develop opportunity for us on the next-generation SK Hynix AI memory, and this will help us secure a stable supply of HBM memory," Raj Mirpuri, Nvidia enterprise vice president, said on a call with reporters. SK Hynix is the leader in production of high-bandwidth memory, the component that sits alongside Nvidia's GPUs in the systems Nvidia sells to cloud customers.
Samsung and Broadcom
Samsung's separate memorandum with Broadcom, valued at an estimated $200 billion, will expand collaboration across memory and foundry technologies to "support the next generation of AI infrastructure," Samsung said in a statement.
Nvidia also said Friday it would invest $1 billion in Naver, a Korean cloud company building data centers around Nvidia GPUs, and would offer capacity to customers in South Korea and abroad before the project's 200 megawatts is completed. SK Hynix, South Korea's second most valuable company, listed on the Nasdaq earlier this month to help finance the buildout.
What is missing
Today's coverage in the dossier came only from CNBC. Wire services, independent analysts and skeptics of the AI capital-spending pace were not represented, so the bearish view of the Korean deals is not surfaced in the reporting used here. That skepticism has been visible elsewhere this week: Alphabet on Wednesday raised its 2026 capital-spending target to as much as $205 billion and posted its first negative free cash flow in more than a decade, and a Thursday selloff in Tesla and Alphabet erased roughly $500 billion in combined market value. South Korean retail traders' leveraged bets on SK Hynix and Samsung had already begun to unravel earlier this month after a Chinese open-weight model narrowed the performance gap with American systems.
The Korean data centers are scheduled to come online in 2027. Nvidia has not detailed the payment schedule behind the $500 billion figure or how much of the Samsung-Broadcom pact is legally binding.