- Lead. South Korean technology companies formalised approximately $950 billion in AI and semiconductor partnership agreements with US firms at a summit held aboard the USS Midway in San Francisco on July 24, in what Seoul is positioning as a bid to become the dominant global hub for AI infrastructure manufacturing.
- Fact. The headline figures are advance supply contracts and multi-year cooperation memoranda rather than equity investments: Samsung and Broadcom agreed on a $200 billion framework covering advanced memory and foundry services, while SK Group committed to a $750 billion chip-supply arrangement with Nvidia spanning five years.
- Stake. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called South Korea “the best place at present to build an AI data center in a short period of time,” a signal of the country’s emerging competitive position in AI infrastructure at a moment when the US and China are each trying to anchor global AI supply chains within their own spheres.
President Lee Jae-myung hosted a gathering of global technology executives aboard the USS Midway museum ship in San Francisco on July 24, using the occasion to announce a cascade of AI and semiconductor partnership agreements between South Korean companies and their US counterparts. The total value of commitments announced at or around the summit reached approximately $950 billion, though the South Korean government’s chief policy advisor Kim Yong-beom was careful to specify the nature of the figures: “These are advance contracts — advance orders for memory chips on that scale. This is not an investment.”
The Deal Structure
Samsung Electronics and Broadcom signed a memorandum of understanding valued at $200 billion over five years, covering both advanced memory semiconductor supply and foundry cooperation for AI chip production. The arrangement builds on an existing relationship between the two companies and extends it explicitly into the AI accelerator supply chain. SK Group, centred on SK Hynix and SK Telecom, committed to a $750 billion long-term arrangement with Nvidia that includes advanced high-bandwidth memory supply and the construction of up to two gigawatts of AI data centre capacity.
SK Telecom separately announced a partnership with Anthropic to jointly develop AI market applications and train specialised engineers in South Korea. Samsung SDS — Samsung’s IT services arm — signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Anthropic on similar terms. The deals follow earlier exploratory discussions between the two companies: Anthropic had previously entered talks with Samsung on a custom AI chip, and the new agreements appear to deepen that relationship beyond hardware into model deployment and human-capital development.
Naver and Hyundai
Naver, South Korea’s dominant internet platform, announced a $10 billion global AI factory plan that includes a $1 billion commitment from Nvidia for GPU supply and technology cooperation, with up to $9 billion in infrastructure support from Brookfield Asset Management. Hyundai Motor Group and Nvidia jointly announced a robot reference platform designed to accelerate AI-powered robotics development — a move that signals Hyundai’s intent to compete in the emerging humanoid-robot manufacturing market alongside Tesla and a growing cohort of Chinese entrants.
Strategic Context
South Korea’s positioning is deliberate. The country already produces the world’s most advanced high-bandwidth memory chips through SK Hynix and Samsung — a chokepoint in the global AI supply chain — and President Lee has been working to convert that technical advantage into broader AI infrastructure primacy. Anthropic’s Amodei pointed specifically to South Korea’s permitting speed and skilled workforce as advantages over competing locations in Europe and Southeast Asia. The agreements arrived at a moment when both Washington and Seoul have an interest in anchoring AI supply chains within the US-aligned technology ecosystem, reinforcing the geopolitical dimension of what might otherwise appear to be purely commercial deals.