On July 25, 2026, at an AI summit in San Francisco and simultaneously in Seoul, NVIDIA and SK Group — South Korea's third-largest conglomerate and parent company of SK Hynix and SK Telecom — announced a strategic partnership valued at over $500 billion. The deal includes building a 2-gigawatt AI factory in South Korea using NVIDIA's DSX platform with SK Hynix hardware, along with a long-term agreement to co-develop next-generation HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). The first AI factory is expected to be operational by 2027, positioning South Korea as a leading AI innovation hub across the Asia-Pacific region.
What Did NVIDIA and SK Group Announce?
The partnership has three major pillars. First, SK Telecom will build a 2-gigawatt AI factory in South Korea on NVIDIA's DSX next-generation data center platform. Second, NVIDIA and SK Hynix — the world's largest HBM memory manufacturer and the critical supplier behind H100 and B200 GPUs — sign a multi-year agreement to co-develop HBM5 and subsequent generations, securing the memory supply that today represents the most critical bottleneck in AI chip production. Third, both companies will collaborate to expand large-scale AI infrastructure access across Asia-Pacific, where demand for compute capacity is growing at 80% annually.
"When NVIDIA secures its memory supply chain and builds 2 GW AI factories, the message for SMBs is clear: in 12 to 18 months, AI compute will be more abundant and cheaper. The time to prepare your AI agent infrastructure is now."
Davarion Group & LabsReal Impact for SMBs
- 01Expected inference cost reduction: by securing HBM supply and expanding GPU manufacturing capacity, NVIDIA can scale production and break the scarcity that keeps chip prices high — historically this translates to lower API prices on cloud platforms.
- 02More GPU availability in cloud: 2 GW AI factories equate to tens of thousands of additional H200 and Blackwell GPUs; AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud will be able to increase quotas for small businesses previously constrained.
- 03Near-term risk: factories won't be operational until 2027; compute costs and access constraints will remain high through 2026, meaning SMBs that adopt AI now will compete with an advantage when prices drop.
- 04Immediate recommended action: evaluate how much compute your current AI agents or flows consume and negotiate capacity commitments with your cloud provider before demand grows even further in Q4 2026.
This partnership is a first-order macroeconomic signal for any company designing its automation strategy. GPU scarcity — which drove up inference prices throughout 2024 and 2025 — was the number-one obstacle preventing SMBs from adopting AI agents in production. By securing HBM memory supply with SK Hynix and building additional manufacturing capacity, NVIDIA is betting that in 18 months the bottleneck won't be silicon, but the talent to design agents that actually generate business value. Companies that arrive at 2027 with mature automation workflows — in sales, customer service, and operations — will be the ones that leverage lower compute prices to scale without proportionally expanding headcount.
At Davarion Group & Labs, we help businesses in Houston, TX and across Latin America design and deploy autonomous AI agents on the most efficient platforms available today — from NVIDIA-powered APIs to open-source models — so that when AI infrastructure becomes cheaper in 2027, your company already has months of operational advantage. Visit davarion.com to schedule a free consultation and discover how to prepare your SMB for the next AI cycle.
