During South Korean President Lee Jae-myung's visit to Silicon Valley, South Korean companies finalized cooperation projects worth approximately $950 billion with global tech giants like NVIDIA
During Lee Jae-myung's visit to Silicon Valley, South Korean companies finalized cooperation projects worth approximately $950 billion with global tech giants like NVIDIA.
Among them, SK Group plans to supply about $750 billion in high-performance semiconductors to relevant tech companies, while Samsung Electronics will supply about $200 billion in chips to Broadcom.
In terms of market mechanisms, this is not a single purchase, but a deep binding of South Korean semiconductors, AI data centers, and U.S. tech platforms; benefiting are the HBM, GPU, and infrastructure supply chains, while under pressure are traditional cyclical logic that relies solely on single-point chip sales.
Source: Public information
ABAB AI Insight
The core of this set of agreements is South Korea upgrading itself from a "memory supplier" to a "co-builder of AI infrastructure." The long-term cooperation between NVIDIA and SK Hynix has already extended to next-generation memory, HBM4, and supply systems for AI training, AI agents, and physical AI, which means South Korean companies are no longer just selling components but are participating in the co-design of the next-generation AI stack. In terms of capital pathways, SK Group is not receiving a one-time order but rather long-term locked orders around Vera Rubin, HBM4, and AI data centers. SK Telecom plans to build a 2GW-level AI data center, with the first phase operational by 2027, indicating that cooperation has progressed from chip procurement to the infrastructure investment phase of "integrated power, data centers, storage, and computing." Historically, this resembles a national-level industrial alliance rather than ordinary commercial contracts: upstream locks in memory, midstream locks in GPUs and networks, and downstream locks in AI factories and industrial clouds. Unlike the past where Japan and South Korea's semiconductors profited from cyclical fluctuations, this round of profits is beginning to shift towards long-term collaboration, capacity reservations, and platform binding. Essentially, this is about restructuring the supply chain: AI is re-bundling semiconductors, cloud, data centers, and power together; those who can provide "continuous supply + long-term expansion + localized deployment" will gain higher strategic pricing power. ABAB News · Law of Cognition
- Chips sell capacity, alliances sell the future.
- The longer the order, the more stable the pricing power.
- Competition in the AI era is not just about computing power, but also about the supply chain.