SAN FRANCISCO — South Korea has announced a staggering $950 billion in new artificial intelligence initiatives involving the country’s tech conglomerates, Samsung Electronics and SK Group, alongside major U.S. technology firms. Revealed by the Blue House following an AI summit hosted by President Lee Jae Myung in San Francisco, the massive state-backed push aims to directly address the acute global shortage of high-speed semiconductor components needed to power next-generation AI models. At the summit, President Lee introduced the “San Francisco AI Declaration,” a roadmap outlining robust technological cooperation between the U.S. and South Korea, after holding high-level meetings with industry leaders including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan.
Under the milestone agreements, SK Group signed deals totaling $750 billion, anchored by a historic $500 billion partnership between its memory wing, SK Hynix, and Nvidia. This initiative will secure next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM4) for Nvidia and includes plans by SK Telecom to build a massive 2-gigawatt data center powered by Nvidia’s advanced Vera Rubin chips, slated to come online in 2027. Concurrently, Samsung Electronics signed a $200 billion memorandum of understanding with Broadcom, covering advanced memory chips, sub-2-nanometer foundry services, and state-of-the-art packaging solutions to co-develop next-generation AI accelerators. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won noted that prominent clients, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are demanding far more processing power and specialized chips than previously forecasted, necessitating closer, multi-billion dollar foundational alliances to build future global computing capacities.
