TL;DR
Nvidia is investing $1 billion in Naver and building a $500 billion business partnership with SK Group spanning data centers and memory chips.
Nvidia will invest $1 billion in South Korean Internet company Naver to help finance an artificial intelligence data center under construction in South Korea, the chipmaker announced late Friday. The financing will allow Naver to more than triple the size of the facility, from 55 megawatts to 200 megawatts, and US private equity firm Brookfield agreed to a non-binding term sheet to finance up to $9 billion for the project. The site will run on Nvidia AI computing hardware.
Separately, Nvidia announced a long-term business partnership with SK Group that it described as valued at more than $500 billion. The figure includes money Nvidia will spend on purchasing memory chips from SK Hynix, the world’s largest supplier of high-bandwidth memory, as well as SK Group’s purchases of Nvidia supercomputers. SK Telecom will build more than 2 gigawatts of AI data centers on the Korean Peninsula, with the first facility opening next year.
The announcements coincide with a visit to Silicon Valley by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, and additional technology deals between Korean and American companies are reportedly in the works. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Bloomberg Television that South Korea is in a “golden age,” pointing to the country’s booming industrial and semiconductor businesses as reasons to invest. Nvidia will also help SK Hynix design future high-bandwidth memory chips, an effort to ensure access to the component that remains in short supply due to the global buildout of AI data centers.
The agreements with Korea are the latest in a year-long investment spree in which Nvidia has committed more than $40 billion in AI capital positions, including $30 billion in OpenAI. Earlier this week, the chipmaker signed a separate deal with Amkor Technology to beef up chip packaging, and recently completed a trip to Japan that included deals with Toyota and Japanese robotics firms. Critics have described the pattern as circular financing, in which Nvidia invests in companies that then buy its hardware. a structure that the chipmaker has replicated with data center operators, neoclouds and now sovereign AI partners.
For South Korea, the deals represent a bet that its semiconductor industry can remain critical to AI development 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 that Nvidia processors require, and establishing a design partnership with Nvidia gives SK Hynix a structural advantage over its rival. Huang has argued that each country should create its own sovereign AI capability, and South Korea, with its chipmaking expertise and abundant engineering talent, is among the best positioned to do so.
