Nvidia forges AI deals with South Korea’s biggest companies
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From left: Samsung Electronics executive chairman Jay Y Lee, Hyundai Motor boss Chung Euisun and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang at a fried chicken restaurant in Seoul on Oct 30.
PHOTO: AFP
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SEOUL – Nvidia has forged a landmark deal to supply its technology to South Korea’s biggest companies, part of an aggressive push to expand artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure around the world.
Under agreements brokered with the country’s Ministry of Science and a trio of corporations – Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor and SK Group – Nvidia will be supplying more than 260,000 of its accelerator chips to help jump-start Korean AI projects.
The US company did not disclose the financial terms of the deals.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang is in the country attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit
As part of the agreements, the South Korean government is building what is known as sovereign AI – computing infrastructure that it will control.
It is deploying more than 50,000 of Nvidia’s latest AI accelerators in data centres, including ones at the National AI Computing Centre and facilities owned by companies such as Kakao, Naver and NHN Cloud.
Samsung, a key supplier of memory chips and one of the world’s largest semiconductor makers, will build an “AI factory” that is home to more than 50,000 Nvidia chips.
Hyundai Motor, meanwhile, has committed to using a similar number of processors based on Nvidia’s Blackwell design. The chips will be used to develop the company’s AI models and help advance manufacturing and autonomous driving.
SK Group, which includes affiliates SK Telecom and SK Hynix, is deploying an array of Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell server chips in what Nvidia called Asia’s first “industrial AI cloud”. The facility will assist with robotics and other uses of AI in the physical world.
The AI frenzy has sent Nvidia’s sales – and market capitalisation – soaring over the past two years. Earlier this week, it became the first company to reach a valuation of more than US$5 trillion
That followed a company conference in Washington where Mr Huang pointed to strong demand for his products over the coming months.
A lingering question is whether Nvidia will be able to sell its Blackwell processors to China, the world’s largest market for chips. The US has curbed exports of the technology to the Asian nation.
Though US President Donald Trump has said he is open to raising the issue with China, the topic did not come up during a meeting this week with counterpart Xi Jinping. BLOOMBERG
