On June 5, the South Korean stock market experienced a 'Black Friday,' with the KOSPI index plummeting 5.54% at the close. When the market opened on June 8, the intraday decline widened to over 8%, triggering the market's circuit breaker mechanism, while Samsung and SK Hynix both fell nearly 10%.
As market jitters intensified, Jensen Huang's visit dramatically played the role of a 'market savior.'
Prior to this, on the evening of Sunday, June 7, local time in South Korea, Jensen Huang held a 'dinner meeting' with SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won, SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung, and others.
After the dinner, Huang confirmed to the media present: NVIDIA's newly launched Vera CPU will utilize SK Hynix DRAM; both sides are preparing for a 'large-scale collaboration' later this year and next year; regarding the current memory chip shortage, he believes it will persist for several years.
Subsequently, NVIDIA and SK Hynix officially announced a multi-year technology cooperation agreement, involving extending AI supercomputing to robotics, digital twins, and semiconductor manufacturing.
Huang even gave a direct sales pitch at the press conference, stating, 'If you are a shareholder of an AI company, you should be happy. Their current prices are very low.'
01 Locking In SK Hynix Memory
Vera is NVIDIA's first dedicated, independent data center CPU. It faces competitors including Intel's Xeon product line, AMD's Epyc chips, and in-house projects from major cloud service providers like Amazon's Graviton.
In this new battleground, NVIDIA has anchored its memory supply to SK Hynix from the outset.
On June 7, NVIDIA and SK Hynix formally announced the establishment of a multi-year technology partnership to jointly develop next-generation memory matching NVIDIA's AI infrastructure roadmap.
It is understood that the collaboration covers a series of NVIDIA product lines for both personal edge devices and the cloud, including the NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI supercomputer, Vera CPU, PCs equipped with RTX Spark, and the Jetson Thor robotics computing platform.
The announcement pointed out that the cooperation aims to secure the supply of advanced memory to cope with the long development cycles, complex manufacturing processes, and high capital investment required for such products, thereby supporting the ongoing construction of global AI factories.
The announcement also listed new markets that SK Hynix will expand into alongside NVIDIA, including AI infrastructure, Personal AI, and Physical AI.
02 AI Feeds Back Into Chip Manufacturing
Beyond supplying memory, SK Hynix is beginning to apply NVIDIA's AI technology to its own chip design and manufacturing processes.
Similar collaborations have previously been implemented at TSMC, most notably in 'computational lithography.'
According to the announcement, SK Hynix is using NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries and AI to accelerate semiconductor simulation, covering areas such as Technology Computer-Aided Design (TCAD) and computational lithography.
The two sides are also working to extend these tools into the semiconductor Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and simulation ecosystem, paving the way for three-way collaboration among chipmakers, NVIDIA, and EDA software vendors.
This means their cooperation is no longer limited to SK Hynix's internal use but is exploring a model that can be promoted to the entire semiconductor industry.
In the manufacturing sector, SK Hynix is advancing the development of digital twin functionality for its wafer fabs, aiming to achieve fully autonomous factory operations. This work is based on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform. Leveraging Omniverse libraries and OpenUSD workflows, SK Hynix can build 3D factory scenes for visualizing, simulating, and optimizing complex semiconductor manufacturing environments.
At the factory operations level, these digital twin functions can also be integrated with NVIDIA's cuOpt decision optimization engine and Metropolis platform to schedule autonomous mobile robots and other assets within the wafer fab.
The announcement also revealed that the two companies are exploring ways to connect the digital twins with existing legacy software and agentic AI workflows, enabling AI systems to reason based on fab data, automatically execute tasks, and improve manufacturing decisions.
03 Laying the Groundwork Half a Year Early
In October 2025, NVIDIA and SK Hynix announced a large-scale infrastructure cooperation.
At that time, the SK Group was building an AI factory equipped with over 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs, with the first phase scheduled for completion by the end of 2027. Upon completion, it is expected to become one of South Korea's largest AI factories.
The factory adopts a 'GPU-as-a-Service' model, opening up to SK Group subsidiaries and external organizations, with the goal of accelerating the digital transformation and industrial innovation of South Korea's industries.
SK Telecom is also involved in the specific deployment.
As an NVIDIA Cloud Partner, SK Telecom plans to build an industrial AI cloud in Asia using NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell server GPUs, with an initial deployment exceeding 2,000 GPUs specifically for running Omniverse workloads, providing computing power to support SK Hynix's semiconductor manufacturing, fab digital twins, and internal AI agents.
During this visit to South Korea, Huang also revealed information: he is in discussions with telecommunications companies because future AI will utilize telecom networks. This aligns with the direction of SK Telecom's involvement in the cooperation.
04 HBM4 Orders Split Among Three Companies
Although NVIDIA signed a multi-year technology cooperation agreement with SK Hynix, for HBM4 supply, NVIDIA has not put all its eggs in one basket.
Upon arriving in Seoul, Huang made a clear statement to reporters: 'All three suppliers are qualified. All three suppliers are in production, and they are all racing to support Vera Rubin.'
These three suppliers correspond to Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology.
In his keynote speech at Computex Taipei, Huang confirmed that Vera Rubin is in full production, with plans for delivery in the third quarter of this year. This system is built around NVIDIA's Vera CPU and Rubin graphics core clusters, with each server rack system paired with terabytes of HBM4 memory.
Looking at the actual progress of HBM4, SK Hynix remains in the leading position.
Reuters reported in September last year that SK Hynix had completed internal certification for HBM4 chips at that time and established a production system for customers, aiming to complete mass production preparation for 12-layer HBM4 products in the second half of 2025. Kim Sunwoo, a senior analyst at Meritz Securities, predicted at the time that thanks to early supply to key customers and the resulting first-mover advantage, SK Hynix's HBM market share would remain in the low sixties percent in 2026.
05 Chip Shortage to Last for Years
The situation of spreading HBM4 supply across three companies does not mean supply pressure will ease immediately.
After the Sunday dinner, Huang also gave a rather pessimistic assessment. He told the media on-site that the memory chip shortage will not end soon. 'The entire industry's supply chain—from wafers to packaging to silicon photonics... everything is in short supply because demand is so high. This situation will last for years.'
This statement comes against the backdrop of the near-endless consumption of advanced memory for the construction of global AI factories.
The shortage Huang mentioned is not a lack of a specific component, but supply tightness at almost every link in the industrial chain. NVIDIA launching Vera Rubin, promoting AI factories, and entering the fields of Personal AI and Physical AI are all driving up demand for memory. This is also why he said all three HBM4 suppliers are racing to support Vera Rubin.
No one wants to fall behind in a situation of supply shortage.
While SK Group was the focus of this South Korea trip, it was not Huang's entire schedule. Upon arrival, he revealed that he had meetings scheduled with Hyundai Motor, LG, SK, Samsung, and Naver. He also mentioned that NVIDIA is actively hiring for its new R&D center in South Korea. From these developments, NVIDIA is systematically deepening its ties with the entire South Korean tech industry. The SK Group is a key part, but not the only part.
