Under the strong momentum of AI industry layout, NVIDIA, the world's most valuable technology giant, announced a series of major cooperation. Nvidia will invest US$1 billion in Naver Corp., a well-known South Korean Internet and cloud services giant, to fund the AI data center it is building in South Korea. Nvidia said the funding will help Naver more than triple the size of the facility.
The project is jointly developed by Naver and U.S. private equity firm Brookfield Corp., and will be fully equipped with NVIDIA's AI computing hardware in the future. Brookfield has also signed non-binding terms and plans to provide up to $9 billion in financing support for the project.
In addition to Naver, Nvidia has also deepened its strategic alliance with SK Group. The two parties will jointly build an AI data center with a computing power of more than 2 gigawatts (GW) on the Korean Peninsula, which is enough to meet the daily electricity needs of about 1.5 million households. The first "AI factory" built by SK Telecom is expected to be officially put into operation next year. This series of cooperation between the two parties will bring mutually deepened business value. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang revealed in an interview that including NVIDIA’s purchase of memory chips and SK Group’s purchase of NVIDIA supercomputers, the commercial value of the “AI Initiative” jointly promoted by the two parties will exceed US$500 billion.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang pointed out that South Korea has strong semiconductor and industrial strength and is fully capable of helping the world build AI infrastructure. For Nvidia, establishing closer ties with SK Group will help ensure the supply of its key computing components - SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, both owned by SK Group, are the world's two largest suppliers of graphics memory and high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and such chips are in extremely short supply in the current wave of global data center construction. Nvidia said it will also assist Hynix in designing the next generation of high-bandwidth memory chips to further strengthen supply chain security.
The announcement of this series of major cooperation coincides with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s visit to Silicon Valley in the United States and attendance at related technology events. It is expected that more technology agreements will be implemented in the future. Recently, Huang is investing intensively in all aspects of the global supply chain to promote product adoption and eliminate bottlenecks that may slow down the spread of AI. In addition to its layout in South Korea, Nvidia has recently signed a US$1.5 billion cooperation agreement with packaging company Amkor Technology, and has reached cooperation with a number of robotics companies and Toyota Motor in Japan. Huang Renxun actively advocates that countries establish their own "sovereign AI" capabilities to ensure data autonomy, and at the same time continue to expand computing power supply channels other than large cloud service providers.