South Korean President Lee Jae Myung flew to San Francisco on July 24 for a summit with the most powerful names in artificial intelligence. Jensen Huang was there. Sam Altman was there. The heads of Samsung, SK Group, Hyundai Motor and Naver flew in. By the end of the day, roughly $950 billion in new AI agreements had been signed, and South Korea had positioned itself as the country most central to the next phase of the buildout.
Nvidia (NVDA) is not slowing down its global hunt for AI infrastructure partners. The chipmaker has spent much of 2026 signing deals across Asia, the Middle East and Europe to secure the chips, memory and power it needs to keep building AI systems.
On July 24, that hunt landed squarely on South Korea, with a cluster of new agreements announced within hours of each other.
Nvidia, SK Hynix seal $500 billion memory deal
Nvidia said on July 24 that it has locked down AI memory supply from SK Hynix, South Korea’s second most valuable company, CNBC reported. The agreement, unveiled late that evening in San Francisco, could be worth $500 billion over a number of years, and it includes large-scale data centers expected to come online in 2027.
SK Hynix affiliate SK Telecom will build a cloud business using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems as part of the deal.
Nvidia said it is targeting enough capacity to require 2 gigawatts of power, a figure that points to a buildout involving hundreds of thousands of graphics processing units working together.
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“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’s enterprise vice president, told reporters on a call. High bandwidth memory, known as HBM, sits directly next to AI chips and feeds them data fast enough to keep expensive processors from sitting idle.
SK Hynix (SKHY) has built its recent momentum on exactly that product. The company ranked first globally in HBM revenue with a 56.4% share in the first quarter of 2026. Its Nasdaq debut showed first-quarter revenue reaching 52.58 trillion won, roughly $34.5 billion, up 198% from a year earlier, with the stock now trading under the ticker SKHY, as TheStreet reported.
Samsung, Broadcom ink separate $200 billion pact
A second, unrelated deal landed the same day. Samsung Electronics said it signed a memorandum of understanding with chip designer Broadcom to expand their collaboration across memory and foundry technologies. The agreement, worth an estimated $200 billion, is meant to help support the next generation of AI infrastructure, Reuters reported.
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The timing is notable given Broadcom’s growing footprint inside the AI supply chain. The company already builds custom silicon for Google’s TPU program. Adding Samsung’s memory and foundry capacity gives Broadcom another lever to pull as demand for custom AI silicon keeps climbing.
For Samsung, the deal is part of a broader push to close the gap with SK Hynix in HBM production while also rebuilding its contract manufacturing business. Samsung has also been courting AI labs directly, following a pattern in which memory makers are moving beyond simply supplying parts and into designing the systems that use them.
Nvidia is not slowing down its global hunt for AI infrastructure partnersPhilip/Getty Images
Naver, Hyundai deals widen Korea’s AI reach
Nvidia’s South Korea push was not limited to memory chips. The company said on July 24 it would invest $1 billion into Naver, a Korean cloud company building data centers around Nvidia’s GPUs, with the project intended to triple the facility size and provide 200 megawatts of AI computing capacity.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang told the gathering that the SK Group partnerships alone represented more than $500 billion in combined business, though he did not detail how that figure was calculated, according to the Korea Herald.
“The SK Group and I are announcing today that our two companies will enter into business partnerships that will represent over $500 billion of business together,” Huang said during a meeting with President Lee in San Francisco.
Huang also said Nvidia would work with Hyundai Motor Group on autonomous vehicles and robotic systems, extending the day’s announcements beyond data centers and semiconductors into transportation.
The comments suggest Nvidia is treating South Korea as a testing ground for AI applications well outside its traditional chip business.
The deals mark a shift in how AI infrastructure gets financed. What used to be the province of a handful of U.S. hyperscalers now involves foreign governments and industrial conglomerates writing checks at a similar scale.
What the deals mean for chip investors
The memory market that underpins all of these deals remains a three-way race.
Samsung Electronics leads with a 38% share of the broader DRAM market, followed by SK Hynix at 29% and Micron at 22%, according to Counterpoint Research data cited in a recent fund manager interview, as TheStreet reported.
Every one of those three now has direct exposure to Nvidia’s expanding supply chain.
Analysts have been warning for months that memory demand is outpacing supply, and the announcements on July 24 only add to that pressure. BofA has pointed to the same dynamic as a reason memory prices could climb across DRAM, NAND and HBM products alike.
For U.S. investors without direct access to Samsung shares, SK Hynix’s new Nasdaq listing and Micron remain the two clearest ways to track the trade. Both are now tied more tightly than ever to decisions being made inside Nvidia’s San Francisco headquarters.
Related: Nvidia stock is doing something it hasn’t done in years
This story was originally published by TheStreet on Jul 26, 2026, where it first appeared in the Technology section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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