Nvidia has announced that it has secured AI memory supply from South Korea's SK Hynix, potentially alleviating concerns as the memory market faces a global shortage:
- Nvidia is aggressively securing supply of high-bandwidth memory, an essential component for its graphics processing units and AI systems.
- SK Hynix's affiliate SK Telecom will build a cloud business using Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems.
The agreement, announced late Friday in San Francisco, could be worth $500 billion over a number of years and includes the construction of large-scale data centers expected to come online in 2027.
Nvidia is targeting enough capacity to require 2 gigawatts of power, indicating a massive buildout with hundreds of thousands of graphics processing units.
SK Hynix is the leader in HBM production, according to analysts.
"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 enterprise vice president, said on a call with reporters.
The agreement is also a sign that massive AI infrastructure buildouts are moving beyond a handful of hyperscalers, with foreign governments and massive conglomerates starting to get involved.
Nvidia also said it would invest $1 billion into Naver, a Korean cloud company building data centers around its GPUs.
SK Hynix, South Korea's second most valuable company, listed on the Nasdaq earlier this month as part of an effort to finance infrastructure developments.
