Nvidia is delivering over 260,000 GPUs to the South Korean government and the country’s industrial giants — by far the largest single deal in Nvidia’s history.
🏭 ~50k GPUs each:
- Samsung is building digital-twin factories and accelerating lithography.
- Hyundai, together with the government, is investing around $3 billion in physical AI.
- SK is developing an industrial AI cloud.
- Naver is using GPUs for sovereign AI.
- The National AI Computing Center is advancing LLMs for the Korean language and industry, with access for universities and startups.
🥉 Compute Leap: Korea’s GPU capacity jumps from about 65,000 to over 300,000 units, making it the third-largest AI compute hub worldwide, behind only the US and China.
⚡ Energy & Cost Challenge: Hyperscale data centers require massive power, cooling, and land. The government and corporations plan joint efficiency and cooling upgrades with Nvidia — otherwise, bottlenecks could appear fast.
5️⃣ Market Boost: Nvidia became the first company ever to surpass a $5 trillion market cap. The Korea deal — along with other major moves such as its $1 billion equity stake in Nokia — helped fuel the ongoing AI and semiconductor rally.
Big Picture
South Korea is taking on a central role in the global AI ecosystem. The focus is shifting from consumer tech to industrial intelligence — spanning manufacturing, mobility, and infrastructure.
With this deal, Nvidia sidesteps China export restrictions and positions Korea as its new strategic hub. AI hardware is turning into national infrastructure, and local chipmakers and memory suppliers stand to benefit from the wave.
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