South Korean companies, including Samsung and SK Hynix, have signed five-year contracts with American tech giants worth $950 billion for the supply of semiconductors for artificial intelligence, the office of the President of South Korea announced on Saturday. The agreements were announced at a summit in San Francisco.
"South Korea will make a leap to become an indispensable country in the supply chain for artificial intelligence. We will become a trustworthy chip production base," said President Lee Jae-myung during the presentation of the "San Francisco AI Declaration."
Over a five-year period, SK Group committed to supply chips worth $750 billion, of which more than $500 billion is for a partnership with Nvidia. Samsung signed a letter of intent with Broadcom worth $200 billion, covering advanced HBM memories and foundry services in sub-2nm technology.
The bilateral meetings were attended by heads of leading companies, including Sam Altman (OpenAI), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), and Hock Tan (Broadcom). The parties also agreed on joint investments in powerful AI data centers with a total capacity of 5 gigawatts, equipped with 2 million GPU processors.
Global demand for computing infrastructure exceeds supply, forcing US entities to urgently secure supplies. South Korea, the world's leading producer of memory chips, approved last month state investments to expand semiconductor clusters to maintain its market leadership position. (PAP)
