Nvidia just spent the summer locking down the one thing money alone can’t buy fast enough: memory. In July 2026, according to a third-party report, the chipmaker and South Korea’s SK Group signed a letter of intent that could give Nvidia priority access to SK Hynix’s high-bandwidth memory for its next-generation Vera Rubin chips. The reported deal landed in San Francisco during an AI summit organized by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, alongside the heads of OpenAI, Anthropic and Broadcom. It came ten days after SK Hynix raised roughly $28 billion in a Nasdaq share sale, and two days after AMD struck its own multi-billion-dollar pact with Anthropic. Three deals, one week, one underlying story: the AI industry’s real bottleneck in 2026 isn’t compute anymore. It’s memory.
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What Nvidia and SK Group Just Announced
Nvidia and SK Group described the partnership as spanning two things: AI factories, Nvidia’s term for large-scale AI data centers, and next-generation memory supply. The centerpiece is a long-term agreement for SK Hynix to supply Nvidia with high-bandwidth memory, including the HBM4 generation that Nvidia’s upcoming chips depend on. The two companies weren’t starting from a blank page: Nvidia’s own newsroom had already outlined a broader AI factory and memory collaboration with SK Group back in October 2025, and the July 2026 announcement effectively formalized and scaled up that earlier framework into a named, dollar-denominated commitment. Alongside the memory piece, SK Telecom committed to building a 2-gigawatt AI data center, with the first phase expected online in 2027. Nvidia said that facility will run on its Vera Rubin platform and draw on SK Hynix HBM4 memory, tying the compute and memory halves of the deal to one physical build-out.
Nvidia and SK Hynix also agreed to jointly develop and optimize next-generation AI memory, a research partnership layered on top of the supply agreement. Crucially, the companies signed letters of intent rather than final binding contracts, a distinction that matters more than the press release headline suggests. The announcement also arrived alongside separate news that Naver and Brookfield plan to expand Naver’s own AI data center footprint in South Korea, part of a broader push by Seoul to position the country at the center of global AI infrastructure spending rather than just supplying its components.
Breaking Down the $500 Billion Figure
Headlines are running with “$500 billion,” but the number needs context most coverage skipped. CNBC reported the agreement “could be worth $500 billion over a number of years,” language that signals a multi-year estimate built from projected memory purchases, data center construction and equipment spending, not a single check Nvidia is cutting SK Group this quarter. A separate analysis from financial research outlet StockwireX, published after the letters of intent were signed on July 24, 2026, echoed that read, describing the deal as “$500B+” in intent rather than cash already committed. The clearest anchor to emerge since the announcement came in a separate CNBC report in August 2026, which put a concrete number on SK Hynix’s side of the ledger: roughly $720 billion in AI memory build-out spending tied directly to the Nvidia agreement, the closest either company has come to disclosing a hard figure behind the $500 billion headline. Beyond that, neither company has published a full year-by-year breakdown of what portion is memory supply contracts, what portion is data center capital spending, or what portion depends on demand materializing as forecast.
That ambiguity isn’t unique to this deal. The AMD-Anthropic pact announced two days earlier used the same “up to” framing for its $5 billion equity commitment and 2-gigawatt compute buildout. Wall Street has started calling this pattern the AI industry’s circular economy: chipmakers, cloud providers and AI labs signing multi-year framework agreements sized in the hundreds of billions, most of them contingent on future capacity, future funding rounds or future demand. That doesn’t make the Nvidia SK Hynix deal meaningless. It means the $500 billion figure describes an ambition and a direction, not a transaction that already happened in full.
Why SK Hynix Holds the Leverage: Inside the HBM4 Bottleneck
The deal reads less like Nvidia doing SK Hynix a favor and more like Nvidia paying for certainty. High-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM that sits next to AI accelerators and feeds them data fast enough to keep the chips busy, has become the tightest link in the AI hardware supply chain. SK Hynix, the company that has led HBM production since the first generation shipped for Nvidia’s A100 in 2020, hit another milestone in September 2025 when it became the first memory maker to produce 12-layer HBM4 — building on mass production of those 12-layer chips for Nvidia that Chosun Biz reported had already begun in the fourth quarter of 2025 — and it has converted that technical lead into orders: Yonhap reported that SK Hynix’s share of Nvidia’s HBM4 allocation for Vera Rubin climbed to roughly 70% in January 2026, up from about 50% just months earlier, and semiconductor industry tracker Semicon put SK Hynix’s allocation at that same roughly 70% level as of September 2026. That combination makes SK Hynix the clear pacesetter for HBM4, the version Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform needs, and the company isn’t standing still on the next node either: it’s targeting samples of its seventh-generation HBM4E memory in the second half of 2026, with mass production slated for 2027.
SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung has not been shy about how tight that supply really is. Speaking to reporters on July 10, 2026, the day of SK Hynix’s Nasdaq debut, Kwak said: “We forecast that next year will be the worst year in the industry’s history from the supply perspective.” He added: “Our customer demand continues to go up, while our capacity has limitations. We still forecast that customer demand will remain higher than our supply capacity even beyond 2030.” That is a memory company CEO telling investors, on the record, that his factories cannot catch up to demand before the next decade, and it tracks with separate reporting that the underlying Nvidia memory agreement itself runs through 2030 — a multiyear horizon Nvidia’s own newsroom disclosed when it first announced the next-generation memory development partnership with SK Hynix in June 2026, a deal Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Reuters at the time runs for more than two years with options to extend it further. For Nvidia, locking in a named, multi-year commitment from the company making that admission is close to essential.
SK Hynix’s $28 Billion Nasdaq Debut Adds Another Layer
The timing of the Nvidia deal is hard to separate from what SK Hynix did two weeks earlier. On July 9, 2026, SK Hynix priced a Nasdaq listing of 17.79 million new American depositary shares, raising roughly $28 billion to $29 billion, one of the largest new share sales anywhere in the world this year. Trading began July 10 under the temporary ticker SKHYV, before switching to the regular ticker SKHY on July 13. The underlying common shares received an additional listing on Korea’s KOSPI exchange on July 29.
The listing was widely read as SK Hynix tapping U.S. capital markets directly while the global AI boom is still funding memory expansion at a scale the company couldn’t finance through Seoul alone. SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won framed the moment in broader terms. In comments reported by Chosun Biz, he said: “With the spread of AI data centers, AI factories, and AI PCs, memory demand will keep growing.” Two weeks later, Nvidia showed up with a $500 billion validation of that thesis. Whether that sequencing was coordinated or coincidental, SK Hynix walked into its most important customer negotiation of the year fresh off a record capital raise and a wave of investor attention.
Vera Rubin: The Chips This Memory Deal Is Built For
Vera Rubin is Nvidia’s next rack-scale AI platform, and it’s the reason HBM4 supply matters so much right now. Nvidia says Vera Rubin is already in full production, with partner systems shipping in the second half of 2026 and production shipments starting this fall. That timeline is built to match SK Hynix’s own delivery schedule, since SK Hynix is set to begin shipping HBM4 chips to Nvidia in the second half of 2026 as well, the same window Vera Rubin systems start reaching partners, and per Nvidia’s own June 2026 announcement, that SK Hynix memory is designed to power four platforms, not just one: Vera Rubin, Vera CPUs, the RTX Spark, and Jetson Thor (RTX Spark laptops became available globally on October 16, 2026 through ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI). The platform pairs a Rubin GPU with a Vera CPU. Nvidia’s technical materials list the Rubin GPU at roughly 336 billion transistors, up to 50 petaflops of inference throughput, 35 petaflops of training throughput, and HBM4 memory delivering 22 terabytes per second of bandwidth, while a full Vera Rubin NVL72 rack carries 20.7 terabytes of HBM4 capacity with bandwidth more than 2.7 times that of the prior HBM3E generation.
The Vera CPU side uses 88 Arm-based Olympus cores across 176 threads, with 1.2 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth and a 1.8 terabytes per second NVLink-C2C link back to the GPU, according to Nvidia’s developer documentation. Scaled up to the rack level, Nvidia says a full Vera Rubin NVL72 system delivers 1.6 petabytes per second of aggregate memory bandwidth. Every one of those numbers depends on HBM4 shipping in volume, on schedule, from a supplier Nvidia trusts. That is the real function of the SK Group deal. It functions less like a memory purchase order and more like an insurance policy on Nvidia’s own product roadmap.
SK Telecom’s 2-Gigawatt Data Center and the 2027 Timeline
On the data center side of the deal, SK Telecom committed to a 2-gigawatt AI facility running on SK Hynix HBM4, with the first phase expected online in 2027, a commitment trade publication StorageNewsletter independently confirmed in an August 2026 report on the buildout. Two gigawatts is a useful yardstick for how large AI infrastructure commitments have gotten. It’s roughly the continuous output of two full-sized nuclear reactors, dedicated to a single company’s AI computing footprint. Nvidia positioned the facility as serving sovereign, physical, agentic and enterprise AI services, corporate shorthand for everything from national government AI projects to robotics workloads to enterprise chatbots.
The regional framing matters too. Nvidia explicitly tied the buildout to AI demand across Asia-Pacific, with South Korea positioned as the anchor market. That lines up with the diplomatic backdrop: the deal was announced at a summit that President Lee Jae Myung organized specifically to bring AI infrastructure leaders to San Francisco, alongside separate news that Naver is expanding its own AI data center capacity with Brookfield. Seoul is treating 2026 as the year South Korea stops being just a component supplier to the AI industry and starts operating as a computing hub in its own right.
Nvidia’s 2026 Partnership Sprint, By the Numbers
The SK Group deal is the largest of several Nvidia-adjacent mega-partnerships announced in 2026, but it isn’t the only one reshaping how AI infrastructure gets built and financed. The table below lines up the year’s biggest disclosed announcements by value and scope.
| Deal | Announced | Headline Value | What It Covers | Key Milestone |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nvidia + SK Group | July 24, 2026 | $500B+ over multiple years | AI data centers plus HBM4 memory supply | First SK Telecom facility live in 2027 |
| AMD + Anthropic | July 22, 2026 | Up to $5B equity, up to 2GW compute | Instinct MI450-series GPUs, Helios racks | First 1GW live in H1 2027 |
| OpenAI + Broadcom | June 24, 2026 | Custom inference chip (“Jalapeño”) | In-house ASIC, about 50% cheaper inference vs. GPUs | Taped out in nine months |
| Micron (U.S. expansion) | July 10, 2026 | $250B through 2035 | Domestic HBM/DRAM fab capacity | New York facility groundbreaking |
| Meta + Microsoft (leases) | 2026, ongoing | $850B in combined data center leases | AI data center real estate | Multi-year build-out underway |
The Competitive Squeeze: Samsung and Micron Race to Catch Up
SK Hynix’s position doesn’t leave Samsung Electronics or Micron standing still, and neither company is actually locked out of Vera Rubin: The Next Web reported in June 2026 that Nvidia had cleared all three suppliers, Samsung, SK hynix and Micron, to provide HBM4 for the platform. Both Samsung and Micron are pushing to expand their own output and win a larger share of that qualified supply, though neither has published the kind of named, dollar-denominated Nvidia agreement that SK Hynix just landed. Micron used the same mid-July window to raise its own ambitions, lifting its U.S. investment target to $250 billion through 2035, breaking ground on a new facility in New York, and lining up supply deals with Ford and Meta.
Samsung, historically the world’s largest memory maker by volume, has spent much of 2025 and 2026 working to close a yield gap with SK Hynix on advanced HBM. Industry reporting describes all three major suppliers as working through Nvidia’s qualification process for HBM4, without a confirmed public timeline for Samsung reaching the scale of commitment SK Hynix now has in writing. For Nvidia, spreading orders across three suppliers is the obvious hedge against exactly the kind of single-vendor shortage SK Hynix’s own CEO has been warning about.
Historical Context: From GPU Scarcity to Memory Scarcity
This is the third distinct hardware shortage the AI industry has lived through since ChatGPT’s 2022 debut, and each one has moved a layer further down the supply chain. The first shortage, in 2023 and 2024, was raw GPU scarcity. Nvidia couldn’t make H100 and A100 chips fast enough, and cloud providers waited months for allocations. The second, through 2025, was a power and data center capacity shortage, as hyperscalers realized they had chips to install but not enough electricity or shell space to run them, a constraint tech-insider.org has tracked closely in South Korea’s own $880 billion chip plan hitting its own power wall.
The current shortage is memory, and the demand side keeps confirming it: on October 21, 2026, Jensen Huang said NVIDIA was experiencing extraordinary demand and that capacity was the constraint. HBM production requires specialized packaging and testing capacity that takes years to build, not months, which is exactly why SK Hynix’s CEO is comfortable forecasting a shortage lasting into 2027 and demand outstripping supply beyond 2030. Each shortage has pushed AI infrastructure spending further upstream, from finished chips to power grids to the raw memory dies themselves. The Nvidia SK Hynix deal is best read as Nvidia trying to get ahead of a fourth shortage before it happens, by owning a piece of the memory roadmap directly instead of buying whatever capacity is left on the open market.
AMD-Anthropic vs. Nvidia-SK Group: A Week of AI Mega-Deals
Two days before the Nvidia-SK Group announcement, AMD and Anthropic unveiled their own strategic partnership at AMD’s Advancing AI 2026 conference. The contrast between the two deals says a lot about how differently companies are placing their bets this year.
| Category | AMD + Anthropic | Nvidia + SK Group |
|---|---|---|
| Date announced | July 22, 2026 | July 24, 2026 |
| Headline value | Up to $5 billion equity investment | $500 billion-plus, multi-year |
| What’s being secured | Compute demand (chip adoption) | Memory supply (HBM4) |
| Core hardware | Instinct MI450-series, Helios racks | Vera Rubin GPUs, SK Hynix HBM4 |
| Capacity commitment | Up to 2 gigawatts | 2 gigawatts (SK Telecom facility) |
| First deployment | First 1GW in H1 2027 | First facility in 2027 |
| Contract status | Strategic partnership announced | Letters of intent signed |
The structural difference matters. AMD’s deal ties an equity investment directly to a customer adopting its chips, essentially paying Anthropic to commit. Nvidia’s deal instead locks in a supplier, paying for guaranteed memory rather than guaranteed demand. Both bets are proxies for the same underlying anxiety: that whichever company lacks a locked-in position by the end of 2026 will be the one paying spot-market prices once the shortage SK Hynix’s CEO is describing actually arrives. For more on the AMD side of that same week, see our coverage of AMD Advancing AI’s Helios bookings and gigawatt-scale commitments.
Market and Investor Reaction
Public reaction to the Nvidia-SK Group announcement has been more measured than the headline number might suggest, partly because so much detail (exact spending splits, equity components, binding contract terms) remains undisclosed. CNBC’s coverage noted that Wall Street’s AI-chip enthusiasm had already been broadening beyond Nvidia alone well before this deal. Reporting from May 8, 2026 tracked investor attention shifting toward Intel, AMD and Micron as the AI trade widened past a single company.
That backdrop shapes how investors are reading this deal: less as a surprise that sends any single stock sharply in one direction, and more as confirmation of a trend that has been building all year. The AI chip trade is increasingly a memory and infrastructure trade, with Nvidia at the center but SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron and AMD all repricing around the same underlying scarcity story.
SK Hynix’s own stock listing offers one more data point for that read. Its American depositary shares have now been trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SKHY since July 13, 2026, giving Wall Street its first extended stretch of direct price discovery on a Korean memory maker, rather than reading SK Hynix’s fortunes secondhand through Samsung or Micron. By August 2026, that listing has become a more direct gauge of how investors are pricing the Nvidia relationship day to day than Nvidia’s own stock, which reflects dozens of other business lines beyond memory supply.
What It Means for Gamers and PC Buyers
None of this is happening in a vacuum for anyone buying a graphics card or a prebuilt gaming PC in 2026. HBM isn’t the memory inside a gaming rig (that’s GDDR and standard DRAM), but HBM, GDDR and consumer DRAM all draw on the same fabs, the same wafer capacity, and often the same packaging lines at SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron. When a memory maker’s most profitable, best-guaranteed revenue comes from HBM contracts with Nvidia, new capacity tends to get prioritized there first.
tech-insider.org has already tracked the downstream effect on consumer hardware pricing this year, from SSD prices climbing as NAND supply tightens to broader RAM shortages hitting gaming PC builders directly. A $500 billion memory commitment from the industry’s largest chip buyer doesn’t reverse that pressure. It signals that the companies setting memory allocation priorities for the next several years are optimizing for AI data centers first, with whatever capacity is left over trickling down to consumer DRAM and graphics memory.
Risks: Letters of Intent Are Not Signed Contracts
The biggest caveat in the entire announcement is also the easiest one to miss. Nvidia and SK Group didn’t sign a completed, binding supply agreement. They signed letters of intent to formalize one. That’s a meaningful legal distinction. Letters of intent signal serious commercial direction, but they typically leave pricing, volume commitments, exclusivity terms and penalty clauses to be negotiated later, and they can be renegotiated if market conditions change.
Neither Reuters, CNBC nor Nvidia’s own release disclosed a specific dollar breakdown, an equity stake, or a binding delivery schedule beyond the 2027 target for SK Telecom’s first data center phase. Given how many “up to” and multi-year qualifiers appear across this deal and the AMD-Anthropic announcement from the same week, the honest read is that both companies have committed to a direction and a scale, with the hardest negotiating (who bears the cost if AI demand growth slows, what happens to pricing if the shortage eases before 2030) still ahead of them.
From Letters of Intent to Binding Contracts: What Has to Happen Next
A third-party report dated October 2, 2026 describes the July partnership as a letter of intent involving SK Group broadly, including possible SK Telecom AI-factory capacity and priority memory access, and not a confirmed $500 billion HBM purchase contract. No official SK hynix or NVIDIA result states that the companies signed a $500 billion deal, and no official price, volume, contract term, or signing date could be verified, so no definitive supply agreement, equity stake, or line-item breakdown of the $500 billion figure has surfaced. That gap between announcement and paperwork is normal for a deal this size, but it also means the real test of this partnership hasn’t happened yet. Converting a letter of intent into a binding contract typically requires agreement on four things: fixed pricing per unit of HBM4 across multiple years, minimum volume commitments from Nvidia, exclusivity or right-of-first-refusal terms for SK Hynix’s capacity, and penalty clauses if either side falls short. None of that has been disclosed publicly, and companies at this stage of a framework deal rarely disclose it until the underlying contract is actually signed.
The timeline adds pressure to get there quickly. SK Telecom’s first 2-gigawatt facility phase is targeted for 2027, and data center construction, chip procurement and HBM4 packaging capacity all require long lead times to line up. If that first phase is going to run on Vera Rubin GPUs and SK Hynix HBM4 as promised, equipment orders and capacity reservations effectively need to be locked in well before the facility opens. That suggests the letters of intent are likely to convert into firmer, more detailed commitments within the next several quarters rather than the next several years, regardless of when either company chooses to make that public.
The “co-develop” language in the original announcement is also worth taking seriously on its own terms. Nvidia isn’t just placing a purchase order; it agreed to jointly develop and optimize next-generation AI memory with SK Hynix, which pulls Nvidia further into its supplier’s product roadmap than a standard customer relationship would. Arrangements where a chip designer embeds its own requirements directly into a memory maker’s next architecture generation tend to raise the cost of switching suppliers later for both sides. SK Hynix gains a committed design partner for HBM4 and whatever memory generation follows it; Nvidia gains influence over a component it doesn’t manufacture but depends on completely.
That interdependence cuts both ways on risk. SK Hynix is the party being asked to commit real capital, expanding packaging and testing capacity sized to Nvidia’s projected demand, based on a framework agreement rather than a signed purchase order. Nvidia’s downside is smaller by comparison, since it hasn’t prepaid for memory it might not end up needing if AI infrastructure spending slows. That asymmetry helps explain why SK Hynix’s own CEO has been so vocal about supply tightness persisting past 2030: it functions as much as a signal to Nvidia and other customers to commit early as it does a straightforward supply forecast.
For anyone tracking whether the $500 billion figure ever becomes something more concrete, three signals matter more than another press release. The first is a filed, material supply contract: SK Hynix’s Nasdaq listing under ticker SKHY means it now carries U.S. disclosure obligations it didn’t have before July 2026, so an agreement of this size would likely surface in a regulatory filing rather than a press statement. The second is capital expenditure guidance on upcoming earnings calls from either company specifically tied to HBM4 capacity for Nvidia. The third is visible construction progress on SK Telecom’s 2-gigawatt facility ahead of its 2027 target. Until at least one of those three shows up, the honest description of this deal stays the same as it was on July 24: a serious, well-funded direction, not a finished transaction.
Five Predictions for the Next 12 Months
Based on the pattern of deals announced across 2026, here’s how this is likely to play out over the next year.
- Samsung and Micron will each announce their own named HBM4 supply agreements within two to three quarters rather than cede the narrative entirely to SK Hynix.
- The letters of intent will convert into definitive agreements with disclosed volume and pricing terms sometime in 2027, likely alongside SK Telecom’s first data center milestone.
- Consumer DRAM, GDDR and NAND prices stay elevated through at least the first half of 2027, since none of the new 2026 capacity is earmarked for retail channels first.
- At least one more gigawatt-scale mega-partnership lands before the end of 2026, following the same template as AMD-Anthropic and Nvidia-SK Group: multi-year commitments framed around a headline dollar figure that describes potential rather than a completed transaction.
- South Korea keeps leaning into AI diplomacy, using SK Hynix’s Nvidia relationship and Samsung’s own ambitions as leverage in trade and investment talks with Washington, building on the summit that produced this announcement.
What Industry Voices Are Saying
Four on-the-record statements from the companies involved capture the stakes better than any outside analyst summary.
“The expansion will include a co-develop opportunity for us on the next-generation SK Hynix AI memory, and this will help us secure a stable supply of HBM memory.”
Raj Mirpuri, Enterprise Vice President, Nvidia, via CNBC
“We forecast that next year will be the worst year in the industry’s history from the supply perspective.”
Kwak Noh-jung, CEO, SK Hynix, via Yahoo Finance
“With the spread of AI data centers, AI factories, and AI PCs, memory demand will keep growing.”
Chey Tae-won, Chairman, SK Group, via Chosun Biz
Read together, the statements describe an industry where the company selling memory is telling the world it can’t make enough of it, and the company buying that memory is responding by committing to a nine-figure, multi-year deal to make sure it’s first in line anyway.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly did Nvidia and SK Group announce?
Nothing official has been confirmed. A third-party report dated October 2, 2026 says Nvidia signed a July 2026 partnership valued at more than $500 billion with SK hynix and SK Group, but describes it as a letter of intent involving SK Group broadly, including possible SK Telecom AI-factory capacity and priority memory access. It is not a confirmed $500 billion HBM purchase contract, and neither Nvidia nor SK hynix has announced one.
Is the $500 billion a signed, binding contract?
No. Nvidia and SK Group signed letters of intent, not a completed supply contract. A third-party report dated October 2, 2026 likewise characterizes the deal as a letter of intent rather than a confirmed $500 billion HBM purchase contract, and neither company has disclosed a definitive agreement; CNBC described the figure as an estimate of what the partnership “could be worth… over a number of years,” not a lump-sum payment.
What is HBM4 and why does it matter for this deal?
HBM4 is the newest generation of high-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM that sits beside AI chips to feed them data fast enough to keep them running at full speed. Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform is built around HBM4, and SK Hynix is currently the industry’s leading HBM supplier.
How does this affect gaming GPU and RAM prices?
Not directly, since HBM is a different product from the GDDR and DRAM used in consumer PCs. Indirectly, all three memory types share fabrication and packaging capacity, so prioritizing HBM4 for AI customers can leave less capacity for consumer memory, adding to pricing pressure already seen in 2026.
What is Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform?
Vera Rubin is Nvidia’s next rack-scale AI computing platform, pairing a Rubin GPU (about 336 billion transistors, up to 50 petaflops of inference performance) with a Vera CPU (88 Arm-based cores). Nvidia says it is in full production, with partner systems shipping in the second half of 2026.
How does this compare to the AMD-Anthropic deal?
AMD’s deal, announced two days earlier, commits up to $5 billion in equity investment tied to Anthropic adopting up to 2 gigawatts of AMD Instinct MI450-series GPUs. Nvidia’s deal instead secures memory supply from SK Hynix rather than demand from a customer, making the two deals complementary rather than directly competing.
When does the first SK Telecom data center come online?
Nvidia and SK Group say the first phase of the 2-gigawatt SK Telecom AI facility is expected online in 2027, running on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform and SK Hynix HBM4 memory.
Are Samsung and Micron part of this deal?
No. This specific agreement is between Nvidia and SK Group. Samsung and Micron are separately working to expand their own HBM4 output to compete for a larger share of Nvidia’s future memory orders, and Micron announced its own $250 billion U.S. expansion plan the same week.
Has anything changed since the deal was first announced?
Not on the contract itself. Nvidia and SK Group are still described as operating under the July 24 letters of intent. No official SK hynix or NVIDIA result states that a $500 billion deal was signed, and no binding supply contract, equity stake, or detailed pricing schedule has been made public. SK Telecom’s first 2-gigawatt facility phase remains on track for a 2027 target, while SK hynix broadened its AI-memory strategy beyond conventional HBM on October 14–16, 2026, and continues HBM development.
