US and South Korean tech giants sign major AI chip and data center deals
2026-07-25
South Korean and US tech giants struck deals worth a total of $700 billion, or about 114 trillion yen, for semiconductors for artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers, deepening cooperation between the two countries that hold key AI technologies.
Cooperation expands at AI summit
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung held an investment event called the AI Summit in San Francisco on the 24th, U.S. time. In step with the event, US and South Korean companies announced a series of individual partnerships.
About 230 people attended the event, including Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong, SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman and Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei. Lee said South Korea will become a hub for the global AI market.
Deals announced one after another
Samsung said it had signed a semiconductor supply contract with US Broadcom worth $200 billion through 2030. The deal includes supplies of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI data centers and contract manufacturing of AI chips.
SK said it would jointly build AI infrastructure with Nvidia worth more than $500 billion. It did not specify the investment period, but said the plan includes long-term HBM supply cooperation and data center construction. Its telecoms unit SK Telecom also said it plans to procure Nvidia's latest graphics processing units (GPUs) and open a massive AI data center with capacity of up to 2 gigawatts.
South Korean internet giant Naver also announced expanded cooperation with Nvidia. For AI data center construction in South Korea, it will receive $1 billion from Nvidia and up to $9 billion from Canadian investment firm Brookfield. Hyundai Motor Group said it will jointly establish a development base for AI robots with Nvidia and cooperate in training talent as well.
South Korea seeks a core role in the supply chain
Before the summit, Lee met individually with executives from US companies. Huang praised Lee's AI promotion policies and called it 'the golden age of South Korea'. He also said Nvidia would send researchers to South Korea and build AI services for the country, including developing a Korean-language large language model (LLM).
Lee also met separately with Altman and Amodei to discuss memory supply and data center plans in South Korea. Lee said he would 'elevate South Korea into a key country in the world's irreplaceable AI supply chain'.
Memory chip supplies are tightening and prices are rising as data center investment surges. Stable procurement is a key issue for US tech companies. Samsung and SK Hynix hold an 80% share of advanced semiconductors for AI data centers.
Samsung and SK said in June that they would invest a total of 800 trillion won, or about 86 trillion yen, to build four semiconductor plants. At the event on the 24th, Choi said the computing power needed in 2026-27 would be 'enormous' and suggested that even the previous investment plans may have been 'too small'.
As South Korea deepens ties with US AI companies around semiconductors, Japan is putting 'physical AI' that enables machines and robots to move autonomously at the center of cooperation. In Japan, where manufacturing is strong, the view is that on-site data has value. When Huang visited Japan in mid-July, he announced partnerships with Toyota Motor, Hitachi and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
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