Samsung Electronics and SK hynix will supply US tech giants including Nvidia with semiconductors in deals worth $950 billion, an adviser to South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said on Saturday.
The two South Korean giants and their American partners have agreed to “continue cooperation” in this sector, Kim Yong-beom, political adviser to the South Korean president, told reporters.
The announcement was made while President Lee Jae Myung was visiting San Francisco for talks with leaders of major US technology companies, including Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Dario Amodei (Anthropic) and Hock Tan (Broadcom).
The announcement includes a proposed five-year cooperation agreement led by SK hynix to supply $750 billion worth of memory chips to companies including Nvidia, Kim said.
It also includes a $200 billion memorandum of understanding between Samsung Electronics and Broadcom to provide advanced memory chips and foundry services for the production of AI semiconductors over the next five years, he added.
South Korea has pledged to triple its spending on artificial intelligence this year, with an ambition to establish itself alongside the United States and China as one of the world’s leading AI powers.
The country is home to the world’s leading memory chip makers, Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, whose advanced semiconductors are key to the rapid rise of the artificial intelligence (AI) industry and boost optimism about the country’s economic prospects.
These high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips are integrated into AI processors alongside powerful graphics chips (GPUs) to generate chatbot responses or images.
Samsung and Broadcom plan to “enter into a strategic collaboration to provide cutting-edge memory solutions, including HBMs, to support Broadcom’s next-generation AI accelerators,” Samsung said in a statement.
For their part, SK hynix and Nvidia aim to “accelerate the development of large-scale AI infrastructures,” said the other major South Korean manufacturer.
