Nvidia and SK Hynix announced a multi-year technology partnership Monday to develop next-generation memory chips for AI data centers and accelerate semiconductor design and manufacturing — even as South Korean chip stocks posted steep losses on the same day.
The agreement covers memory supply for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin AI supercomputers, Vera CPUs, RTX Spark-powered PCs, and Jetson Thor robotic computing platforms, the company said
The two firms will also apply AI to chip design and manufacturing, using Nvidia’s CUDA-X libraries and PhysicsNeMo framework to speed up semiconductor simulations, and will develop factory digital twins aimed at autonomous fab operations. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who arrived in South Korea on Friday, described SK Hynix as Nvidia’s largest memory partner and said the arrangement would persist. “We already procure and we buy from SK Hynix already billions and billions of dollars each year, and it’s going to grow substantially,” Huang told reporters, according to Reuters. He said the deal runs more than two years with the option to keep extending.
Huang also confirmed that Nvidia’s new Vera CPU — the company’s first standalone data center microprocessor — will use SK Hynix’s DRAM, according to Bloomberg. Despite the partnership news, SK Hynix stock ended Monday’s session 7.7% lower in Korean trading, having fallen as much as 10.3% intraday. Samsung Electronics finished the session down 10.2%.