Nvidia's Huang hails expanded partnerships with Korean tech giants

On the final day of his visit to Korea on Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced extended cooperation with major Korean conglomerates — Hyundai Motor, SK, Naver and Doosan — to embed the U.S. chip giant’s AI platforms into manufacturing and AI data centers.   

In a meeting with Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Chun Young-hyun, meanwhile, the two companies agreed to expand cooperation in foundry and next-generation high bandwidth memory, HBM5.

Hyundai Motor’s ambitious AI and robotics cluster, situated on a large reclamation plot in Saemangeum, North Jeolla, will likely bring with it a wide suite of Nvidia’s latest platforms as part of a deepening relationship between the two firms.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dubbed the site for the 9 trillion won ($5.8 billion) initiative “AI Valley,” likening it to Silicon Valley in California, during his visit to the Korean automaker's office on Monday.

“ES [Hyundai Motor Executive Chair Euisun Chung] invited me to build Nvidia in Saemangeum. I said that so long as there's excellent barbecue pork, I'm very happy to build Nvidia, and so those are the areas we spoke about, how do we align our engineering teams and our teams to move faster,” said Huang during the visit, which Chung hosted.

Huang also hinted at the possibility of setting up a research center in the area.

“And so it is very, very logical for Nvidia to build a research center here especially when it intersects with robotics. AI for robotics is very natural, very sensible and very smart for Nvidia to build in Korea,” he said.

The chief of the U.S. chip giant highlighted the growing cooperation between the two companies as Hyundai and its robotics subsidiary already deploy Nvidia platforms for developing autonomous vehicle system and robots.

“Our two companies [are] doing more and more work together. Hyundai is a mobility giant, and we are uniting AI and Hyundai’s expertise in mobility, we transform the future of mobility and invent the future of robotics,” he said.

Nvidia also broadened cooperation with Korean chipmaker SK hynix to develop next-generation memory chips that will power Nvidia's AI infrastructure. SK's telecommunication arm, SK Telecom, will begin operating its first AI factory in 2027 on Nvidia's platform.

"SK is our largest memory partner," Huang told reporters after the meeting at SK's Seorin building in Jongno district, central Seoul. "We are expanding our partnership to include many new markets. [...] We announced a redesign, a reinvention of the world's personal computers we call RTX Spark, a partnership between us and Microsoft to reinvent the personal computer for the first time in 40 years, and that will have SK hynix inside.

"The next wave called physical AI and robotics — we built a processor called Jetson Thor, and that will have SK hynix inside."

The long-term partnership was struck to ensure a stable supply of advanced memory chips, which take years to design and bring to market, the companies said.

Under the agreement, SK hynix and Nvidia will jointly develop memory for a wide range of Nvidia AI products, from data center supercomputers to consumer PCs and robotics systems — specifically the Vera Rubin AI supercomputer, Vera CPU, RTX Spark PC and Jetson Thor robotic computing platform.

SK hynix will also use Nvidia's software tools to speed up its internal chip development processes — work that traditionally requires enormous computing resources and time. This includes using Nvidia's CUDA-X software toolkit, which lets applications run much faster on Nvidia's chips, and PhysicsNeMo, an Nvidia framework that uses AI to simulate physical processes in chip manufacturing, such as how light interacts with a chip's surface during production.

The partnership will extend to electronic design automation — the software used to design chips— to form a three-way collaboration between chipmakers, Nvidia and the companies that make chip design software.

The two companies are also working together on digital twin technology to enable real-time AI monitoring and smarter decision-making on the production floor.

For SK Telecom, the focus is on building out AI factories: purpose-built facilities optimized for AI workloads, going beyond what conventional data centers can do. The first is expected to go online in Korea next year, built on Nvidia's DSX platform — a blueprint that covers everything from the chips inside to the software, power infrastructure, and operational systems.

"AI factories are essential for Korea's universities, scientific labs, startups and industries," Huang said. "Just like electricity, water and the internet, Korea will be powered by AI in the future. It will be used in every country, every company and every industry — including, of course, the manufacturing of chips and telecommunications."

LG announced a similar blueprint, as affiliates like LG Electronics, information technology service provider LG CNS and battery maker LG Energy Solution will use Nvidia platforms.

“Together with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, we had a very in-depth and inspiring discussion on strategic cooperation that will transform future industries,” LG Chairman Koo Kwang-mo said, adding, “The blueprint for the AI ecosystem envisioned by Nvidia aligns with LG’s future direction of creating meaningful changes in customers’ daily lives and global industrial sites. With today’s meeting as a starting point, we will further solidify our partnership by combining the unique capabilities of both companies.”

The U.S. chip giant also unveiled a cooperation with Naver, the country’s top internet firm cited by Huang as a key partner during Computex 2026, to build a gigawatt-level computing infrastructure dubbed AI Factory.

In the beginning phase, the Korean firm plans to operate a 55-megawatt facility in the first half of 2027, and then expand the infrastructure capacity to 100 megawatts within the same year and 200 megawatts by 2028 before reaching the ultimate gigawatt level.

Naver Chairman Lee Hae-jin said the alliance was "highly encouraging" because it would allow the company to present "a concrete alternative" for countries and regions around the world seeking to establish their own sovereign AI capabilities.

"The partnership is particularly meaningful as it creates an opportunity for Naver's technological and infrastructure strengths to expand to the global stage," he said.

With machinery to construction conglomerate Doosan, Nvidia will extend the area of cooperation across physical AI, robotics and AI infrastructure with an aim of integrating Nvidia’s advanced AI platforms into systems of Doosan affiliates.

For instance, Doosan Robotics is adopting robotics frameworks called Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab and robot-focused platforms such as Jetson Thor and Agentic Robot OS, while Doosan Enerbility is exploring the use of DSX, an architectural blueprint for building large-scale data centers. 

BY LEE JAE-LIM, PARK EUN-JEE, SARAH CHEA [[email protected]]