South Korea's AI Foundation.
SK Telecom and Nvidia Plan Gigawatt AI Factories to Boost South Korea's Sovereign Capabilities.
Nvidia and SK Telecom, backed by SK Group’s broader push, announced plans to build gigawatt-scale “AI factories” in South Korea that combine Nvidia’s DSX full-stack platform with an AI-focused cloud designed to support training, inference, and agentic AI. SK Telecom expects to bring the first DSX-based AI factory online in 2027, positioning the telecom operator as a provider of national AI infrastructure rather than only connectivity. The effort is meant to strengthen South Korea’s sovereign AI capabilities and expand “physical AI” and enterprise AI services for industries such as semiconductors, robotics, and manufacturing, while reducing reliance on overseas hyperscalers. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed telecom and AI cloud infrastructure as utility-like foundations needed for large-scale AI buildouts, citing rapid global demand that is still in an early stage. Chey Tae-won said the partnership would move beyond their earlier focus on memory chips toward a wider SK Group-level integration to meet fast-changing AI computing needs. Separate reporting also highlighted Nvidia’s other South Korean partnerships and how traders and prediction markets see these deals as supportive of Nvidia’s competitive position and potential market valuation.
Key Points
Chey Tae-won said the partnership would “raise the partnership to the SK Group level,” and that their term “AI factory” covers not only AI data centers but also related infrastructure “including the semiconductor fabs of SK hynix.”
The leaders’ announcement was made during a joint briefing at SK Group headquarters in central Seoul, where they reviewed an AI infrastructure roadmap and agreed to expand cooperation “across the entire SK Group” to respond to fast-changing AI-computing demand.
Nvidia and SK Group framed the expanded effort as a deeper integration in South Korea’s AI buildout by comparing AI infrastructure demand to utilities and emphasizing that South Korea’s existing infrastructure is limited—implying the project is intended to scale data centers “similar to semiconductor fabs.”
Reporting on the wider Nvidia–South Korea push said Nvidia’s other partners include Naver and Doosan (alongside SK Hynix and SK Telecom), as part of a broader U.S.–South Korea technology collaboration aimed at bolstering AI data centers and memory chips—investors monitoring the deals for possible valuation impact.
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