South Korean chip giants to supply US tech firms in $950B deals

South Korea’s leading memory chip makers, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, are set to provide top U.S. tech companies, including Nvidia, with their highly sought-after products in agreements worth $950 billion, a presidential adviser said on Saturday.

The announcement was made as President Lee Jae Myung visited San Francisco for talks with the heads of major U.S. technology companies, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Broadcom’s Hock Tan.

The two South Korean chip giants and U.S. tech companies agreed to “pursue cooperation” in the sector, presidential chief of staff for policy Kim Yong-beom told reporters in San Francisco while accompanying Lee.

South Korea is home to the world’s leading memory chipmakers, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, whose advanced memory chips are essential to the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence industry and have fuelled optimism about the country’s economic outlook.

The announcement includes SK Hynix’s planned five-year cooperation agreement to supply $750 billion worth of memory chips to companies, including Nvidia, Kim said.

It also includes a $200 billion memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Samsung Electronics and Broadcom covering the supply of advanced memory chips and foundry services for AI chip production over the next five years, he said.

South Korea has pledged to triple spending on AI this year, aiming to join the U.S. and China as one of the world’s top powers in the sector.

SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics are among the world’s three leading advanced memory chipmakers, along with U.S.-based Micron.

Such chips, called high-bandwidth memory (HBM), are used in AI processors alongside powerful silicon known as GPUs to generate chatbot responses or realistic images.

The AI boom has also fuelled worker demands over pay packages, with Samsung averting a major strike in May by agreeing a deal on bonuses with its largest union.

Samsung and Broadcom plan to “pursue a strategic collaboration for the supply of industry-leading memory solutions, including HBM, supporting Broadcom’s next-generation AI accelerators,” Samsung said in a statement.

SK Hynix and Nvidia also aim to “accelerate large-scale AI infrastructure development,” the South Korean firm said.

The two firms “will co-develop and optimize next-generation AI memory solutions, including HBM, to meet evolving infrastructure demands ranging from large language model training to physical AI”, it said in a statement.

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