NVIDIA has teamed up with with South Korea's biggest companies and the country itself, as they build out their AI infrastructure. One of those companies is Samsung, which is building a new AI factory that will use 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell server GPUs and other NVIDIA technologies to make its own chips. This "AI-driven semiconductor manufacturing," as the companies call it, will help Samsung improve its processes, better predict maintenance needs and improve the efficiency of its autonomous operations. NVIDIA will help Samsung adapt its chipmaking lithography platform to work with its GPUs, and it will apparently result in 20 times greater performance for Samsung.
Korean carmaker Hyundai will also use 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to develop its AI models for manufacturing and autonomous driving. Meanwhile, the SK Group conglomerate, which includes SK Telecom and DRAM and flash memory chip supplier SK Hynix, will use 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell server chips to launch an industrial AI cloud. The facility, NVIDIA says, will power the "next generation of memory, robotics, digital twins and intelligent AI agents." As Bloomberg reports, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who's in South Korea for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit, was recently photographed with Samsung's Jay Y. Lee and Hyundai’s Chung Euisun in a local restaurant.
Finally, NVIDIA is working with the South Korean government for its sovereign AI infrastructure, or AI it will have control over. The Korean government will deploy 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs to the National AI Computing Center it's establishing, as well to facilities owned by local companies that include Kakao and Naver.