SK convened with global tech giants in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of American artificial intelligence (AI) innovation, to collaborate on expanding the global AI ecosystem.
At the K-AI Summit held at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, SK announced partnerships with NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Anthropic to advance AI infrastructure, including semiconductors and data centers.
In a separate meeting with Amazon Web Services (AWS), they explored ways to broaden domestic AI infrastructure cooperation, building on their existing partnership forged through the joint Ulsan AI data center project.
SK aims to bolster South Korea’s AI competitiveness while simultaneously driving global AI ecosystem growth.
SK and NVIDIA are set to forge a long-term partnership for AI factory development and memory production, potentially valued at over 500 billion USD.
The companies inked a letter of intent outlining their comprehensive AI infrastructure collaboration.
SK Telecom will receive cutting-edge graphic processing units (GPUs) to establish South Korea’s largest 2-gigawatt AI factory, advancing their investment partnership. This move concretizes the domestic GW-scale AI factory plan agreed upon last month.
Starting in 2027, SK Telecom plans to phase in a high-performance AI factory using NVIDIA’s DSX platform and SK Hynix’s sixth-gen high-bandwidth memory 4 (HBM4) memory in its next-gen Vera Rubin AI computing system.
This initiative will accelerate large-scale AI infrastructure development, encompassing sovereign, physical, and agentic AI, to meet growing demand across South Korea and the Asia-Pacific region.
The partnership is expected to catalyze the adoption of NVIDIA-powered AI infrastructure and expand access to advanced cloud services. SK Telecom will invest heavily in AI infrastructure, democratizing cutting-edge AI resources.
SK Hynix will engage in long-term AI memory cooperation, building on their existing technology partnership. This ensures NVIDIA a stable supply of next-gen AI memory while expanding SK Hynix’s AI memory business.
The firms will jointly develop and optimize next-gen AI memory, like HBM, to meet evolving infrastructure needs from large language model (LLM) training to agentic and physical AI.
SK Hynix and Microsoft are pursuing long-term memory supply cooperation, focusing on AI-optimized solutions for Microsoft’s data centers to address surging AI service demand.
They aim to co-develop memory solutions tailored for AI workloads and establish new AI server memory standards through real-world testing.
SK Telecom Expanding AI Data Center Collaborations With Anthropic and AWS
SK Telecom and Anthropic signed a comprehensive memorandum of understanding (MOU) to co-develop a GW-scale AI data center in South Korea.
Anthropic will join SK Telecom’s ongoing AI data center project, discussing specific collaboration plans. This MOU extends their partnership, which began with SK Telecom’s 2023 strategic investment.
With AWS, they’re broadening AI infrastructure cooperation, leveraging their Ulsan AI data center partnership. The alliance aims to combine SK Telecom’s local expertise with AWS’s global tech and client base to expand across South Korea and secure long-term GW-scale AI computing capacity.
Chairman Chey Tae-won met with OpenAI Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sam Altman to discuss long-term AI infrastructure collaboration. SK and OpenAI have been exploring partnerships in memory and AI infrastructure, strengthening ties since their October agreement on memory supply and southwestern AI data center development.
At the AI Summit, Chey emphasized that while the three mega projects’ scale may seem daunting, they’re grounded in real global AI market demand. He stated that this is a crucial AI initiative for South Korea’s growth and the collective future. It must unite the efforts to ensure its swift success.
Chey outlined three key objectives: creating an AI-native country with widespread AI agent adoption; reducing costs through memory production and data center expansion; and establishing robust AI governance while mitigating potential downsides through job creation and environmental stewardship.
Chey and SK Group executives visited NVIDIA’s headquarters, reaffirming their longstanding partnership over dinner. Attendees included SK Hynix CEO Kwak No-jung, SK Telecom and NVIDIA representatives, and Madison Huang, NVIDIA’s Senior Director of Omniverse and Robotics Product Marketing.
