On June 5, South Korea’s stock market experienced a "Black Friday," with the KOSPI index closing down 5.54%. On June 8, after opening, the intraday decline widened to over 8%, triggering a trading halt; both Samsung and SK Hynix fell nearly 10%.
Amid market panic, Huang Renxun’s visit dramatically took on the role of a market savior.
Previously, on Sunday evening, June 7, Korea time, Jensen Huang held a dinner meeting with SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won, SK Hynix CEO Kwon No-jung, and others.
After the meal, Jensen Huang confirmed to the media present that NVIDIA’s newly launched Vera CPU will use SK Hynix DRAM; the two companies are preparing for a “massive collaboration” in the second half of this year and next year; regarding the current memory chip shortage, he believes it will last for several years.
Subsequently, NVIDIA and SK Hynitz announced a multi-year technology collaboration agreement covering AI supercomputing applications in robotics, digital twins, and semiconductor manufacturing.
Huang Renxun directly endorsed it at the press conference, saying, "If you're a shareholder of an AI company, you should be pleased, as their current prices are very low."
01 Lock SK Hynix Memory
Vera is NVIDIA's first standalone CPU designed specifically for data centers, competing against Intel's Xeon lineup, AMD's EPYC chips, and custom projects like Amazon's Graviton from major cloud providers.
In this new battlefield, NVIDIA anchored its memory supply with SK Hynix from the outset.
On June 7, NVIDIA and SK Hynix officially announced a multi-year technology partnership to jointly develop next-generation memory aligned with NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure roadmap.
It is understood that the collaboration covers a range of consumer-side and cloud-based products, including the NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI supercomputer, Vera CPU, PCs equipped with RTX Spark, and the Jetson Thor robotics computing platform.
The announcement states that the collaboration aims to secure the supply of advanced memory to address the long development cycles, complex manufacturing processes, and high capital investments required for such products, thereby supporting the ongoing construction of global AI factories.
The announcement also lists several new markets that SK Hynitz will expand into, led by NVIDIA, including AI infrastructure, personal AI, and physical AI.
02 AI Enhances Chip Manufacturing
In addition to supplying memory, SK Hynix has begun integrating NVIDIA's AI technologies into its own chip design and manufacturing processes.
Similar collaborations have previously been implemented at TSMC, with the most prominent example being "computational lithography."
According to the announcement, SK Hynix is using NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries and AI to accelerate semiconductor simulation, covering areas such as technology computer-aided design (TCAD) and computational lithography.
Both parties are also working to extend these tools into the semiconductor electronic design automation (EDA) and simulation ecosystem, paving the way for a three-way collaboration among chip manufacturers, NVIDIA, and EDA software providers.
This means that the collaboration between the two parties is no longer limited to SK Hynix’s internal use, but is instead exploring a model that can be applied across the entire semiconductor industry.
During the manufacturing process, SK Hynix is developing digital twin capabilities for its wafer fabs with the goal of achieving fully autonomous factory operations. This effort is built on NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform. Leveraging Omniverse libraries and the OpenUSD workflow, SK Hynix is creating 3D factory environments to visualize, simulate, and optimize complex semiconductor manufacturing processes.
At the factory operations level, these digital twin capabilities can integrate with NVIDIA cuOpt decision optimization engine and Metropolis platform to coordinate autonomous mobile robots and other assets within the semiconductor fab.
The announcement also reveals that the two companies are exploring ways to integrate digital twins with existing legacy software and AI agent workflows, enabling AI systems to reason based on semiconductor fab data, automatically execute tasks, and improve manufacturing decisions.
03 Lay the groundwork six months in advance
In October 2025, NVIDIA and SK Hynitz announced a major infrastructure collaboration.
At that time, SK Group was building an AI factory equipped with over 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs, with the first phase scheduled for completion by the end of 2027. Once completed, it is expected to become one of the largest AI factories in South Korea.
The facility operates on a "GPU as a Service" model, open to subsidiaries of SK Group and external organizations, with the goal of accelerating South Korea's digital transformation and industrial innovation.
SK Telecom is also responsible for the specific deployment tasks.
As an NVIDIA cloud partner, SK Telecom plans to build an industrial AI cloud in Asia using NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell server GPUs, with an initial deployment of over 2,000 GPUs dedicated to running Omniverse workloads to support SK Hynix’s semiconductor manufacturing, wafer plant digital twins, and internal AI agents.
During his visit to Korea, Huang Renxun also revealed that he is in discussions with telecommunications companies, as future AI will rely on telecom networks—an alignment with SK Telecom’s collaborative direction.
04 Three companies split the HBM4 orders
Although NVIDIA has signed a multi-year technology cooperation agreement with SK Hynix, it has not put all its eggs in one basket when it comes to HBM4 supply.
Upon arriving in Seoul, Huang Renxun clearly told reporters: “All three suppliers have been certified. All three are already in production and are competing to support Vera Rubin.”
These three suppliers correspond to Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology.
During the keynote address at Computex Taipei, Jensen Huang confirmed that the Vera Rubin system is now in full production and is scheduled for delivery in the third quarter of this year. The system is built around NVIDIA’s Vera CPU and Rubin GPU cluster, with each server rack configured with terabytes of HBM4 memory.
Based on the actual progress of HBM4, SK Hynix remains in the lead.
In September last year, Reuters reported that SK Hynix had completed internal certification of its HBM4 chip and established a production system for customers, aiming to be ready for mass production of 12-layer HBM4 products in the second half of 2025. At the time, Meritz Securities senior analyst Kim Sunwoo predicted that, thanks to early supply to key customers and the resulting first-mover advantage, SK Hynix’s HBM market share in 2026 would remain at just over 60%.
05 Chip shortages will last for several years
Expanding the supply of HBM4 across three parties does not mean that supply pressure has been alleviated.
After dinner on Sunday night, Jensen Huang offered a less optimistic assessment. He told the media present that the shortage of memory chips will not end soon. “The entire industry supply chain—from wafers to packaging to silicon photonics—is in short supply because demand is so high. This situation will last for several years.”
The context of this statement is the nearly insatiable demand for advanced memory driven by global AI factory construction.
The shortage Huang Renxun referred to is not a lack of any single material, but rather tight supply across nearly every stage of the supply chain. NVIDIA’s launch of Vera Rubin, promotion of AI factories, and entry into personal AI and physical AI domains are all driving up demand for memory. This is why he said all three HBM4 suppliers are competing to support Vera Rubin.
No one wants to be left behind in a situation where demand exceeds supply.
During this trip to Korea, while SK Group was a key focus, it was not the entirety of Jensen Huang’s schedule. Upon arrival, he revealed that he had arranged meetings with Hyundai Motor, LG, SK, Samsung, and Naver. He also disclosed that NVIDIA is actively recruiting personnel for its new research and development center in Korea. These moves indicate that NVIDIA is systematically deepening its ties with the broader Korean technology industry—SK Group is a crucial part of this effort, but not the only one.