Nvidia (NVDA) said Friday that it will supply as many as 260,000 of its AI chips to South Korean companies and the country’s government as part of a massive sovereign AI push.
During a gathering of world leaders at the APEC Summit in South Korea, Nvidia announced multiple separate deals across the public and private sectors, including with four of the country’s largest companies — Samsung (005930.KS), SK Group, Hyundai (005380.KS), and NAVER Cloud.
The deals would boost South Korea’s use of Nvidia’s AI chips to more than 300,000 from the country’s current 65,000 chips, Nvidia said.
Nvidia declined to comment on the value of the deals or the exact timelines.
The leading AI chipmaker said the move was part of South Korea’s push for AI sovereignty. Sovereign AI refers to the growing movement by nations around the world to develop their own domestic AI infrastructure and models so they can be technologically independent.
Nvidia said in June that it expects the so-called sovereign AI market to grow to $1.5 trillion in the next several years. The latest news from South Korea follows a slew of high-profile sovereign AI deals for Nvidia in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Europe, and the UK announced over the past year.
During its second quarter earnings report in August, Nvidia projected that such sovereign AI deals would likely contribute more than $20 billion to its fiscal year 2026 revenue.
Nvidia’s push in striking such deals comes as the US-China trade conflict has effectively killed the leading chipmaker’s once-booming business in China.
D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria explained that sovereign AI is important to Nvidia because fueling a global AI infrastructure buildout is critical to the company’s growth.
“Before this year, China made up as much as 25% of Nvidia’s market,” he said. “Without China, Nvidia would need to expand the rest of its international business in order to continue to develop the market for AI data center equipment.”
As part of the Nvidia expansion in South Korea, tech giant Samsung, multinational conglomerate SK Group, and automaker Hyundai announced Friday that they are building separate AI factories that will deploy 50,000 GPUs (graphics processing units, or AI chips) each. NAVER Cloud — Korea’s equivalent of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure and a key IT partner of the country’s government — is also expanding its AI infrastructure with 60,000 GPUs.
Meanwhile, the Korean government’s Ministry of Science and ICT will buy more than 50,000 of the Nvidia chips over the next several years through its national AI computing center and partnerships with companies such as NHN Cloud and NAVER Cloud. The government will also use Nvidia’s software to develop its sovereign AI models.
