South Korea Signs $950 Billion in AI Chip Supply Deals
2 min readSouth Korea has placed itself at the center of the global AI supply chain. During President Lee Jae-myung’s visit to San Francisco, Korean chipmakers and technology firms unveiled roughly $950 billion in new AI chip supply agreements with American AI companies, one of the largest cross border technology commitments ever announced.
What Was Announced
The headline deals came from the country’s two memory giants. Samsung Electronics signed a $200 billion memorandum with Broadcom spanning memory, foundry manufacturing, and advanced packaging. SK Group committed to about $750 billion in long term semiconductor supply, including more than $500 billion earmarked for Nvidia. President Lee announced the agreements after meeting the heads of OpenAI, Nvidia, Anthropic, and Broadcom, according to the Taipei Times.
Why South Korea’s AI Chips Are the Prize
Modern AI accelerators are only as fast as the memory feeding them. High bandwidth memory, or HBM, sits stacked beside the GPU and moves data at enormous speed, and Samsung and SK Hynix together supply most of the world’s HBM. That makes South Korea a chokepoint for AI hardware in much the same way Taiwan’s TSMC dominates advanced logic. Locking in half a decade of supply gives Nvidia and its rivals the certainty they need to plan massive data center buildouts.
The deals were not only about exports. NAVER and Nvidia said the Korean internet company will expand its sovereign AI infrastructure on Nvidia’s DSX platform, starting at 55 megawatts and scaling toward gigawatt capacity at its data center in Sejong.
Market and Strategic Impact
Investors responded quickly. SK Hynix rose about 3.5 percent and Samsung Electronics gained roughly 2 percent as the agreements landed, lifting the broader Kospi index. The strategic message is bigger than the share moves: as AI spending shifts from software to physical infrastructure, the countries that make memory and logic chips gain real leverage. For South Korea, that leverage is now measured in the hundreds of billions.