Nvidia Forms $500 Billion AI ‘Partnership’ With Memory Chip Giant SK
The AI giant is continuing to use its balance sheet to help its biggest customers and partners buy and manufacture its AI servers.
Nvidia on Friday announced a $500 billion partnership with the conglomerate that owns SK Hynix, whose high-bandwidth memory chips are critical to Nvidia’s AI servers. The partnership aims to help Nvidia access more memory chips and fill more data centers with its servers.
Nvidia’s representatives didn’t elaborate on which firms would spend such a large amount or precisely what it would be for. Nvidia and the SK Hynix parent company said they would build two gigawatts of AI cloud capacity together, which could cost around $100 billion, based on today’s prices for data centers that consume such power. Their engineers also plan to work more closely together to develop new high-bandwidth memory products.
An Nvidia executive said the company’s biggest priority is to get its AI servers online as fast as possible, so it’s helping more customers find land, power, memory and raw materials to make AI data centers happen quickly.
“ What’s limiting the access to compute capacity is the fact that it’s very hard to find powered data centers, powered land,” said Raj Mirpuri, Nvidia’s vice president of global AI clouds and infrastructure, in a briefing with reporters. For instance, he said Nvidia helped Naver, the South Korean search firm, secure access to land and power to expand an AI data center from 55 megawatts to 200 MW by 2028. (Such a facility is relatively small compared to AI facilities underway in the U.S.)
Nvidia also plans to invest $1 billion in Naver and asset manager Brookfield has committed to fund the project with $9 billion. Naver is set to pay for the rest. The new data center is expected to start with Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell server racks and later add next-generation Vera Rubin racks.
Nvidia is increasingly using its balance sheet to help its customers afford more AI chips and help its cloud provider partners get financing to build new facilities for the chips.