Samsung, SK and partners outline major chip and AI deals during Lee visit

South Korean officials and company executives outlined about $950 billion in semiconductor and AI cooperation during Lee Jae Myung’s July 25 Silicon Valley visit, with the largest components described as forward purchase commitments rather than equity investments. Samsung Electronics said it signed a five-year memorandum of understanding with Broadcom worth more than $200 billion through 2030 across high-bandwidth memory, 2-nanometer and below foundry manufacturing, and advanced packaging, while SK Group said it had $750 billion in long-term memory chip supply partnerships with Nvidia and other U.S. technology firms. Jensen Huang later said Nvidia’s partnership with SK Group alone could exceed $500 billion across memory, AI supercomputers and data centers. Related summit developments also gave more detail on Naver’s Sejong AI factory, which Naver, Nvidia and Brookfield expanded from an initial 55-megawatt plan announced in June 2026 to 200 megawatts by 2028 under a $10 billion financing structure. Brookfield’s contribution of up to $9 billion is a nonbinding term sheet, Nvidia’s roughly $1 billion equity investment in Naver is conditional on Naver securing at least $9 billion of financing from other sources, and Naver will fund the remainder. The Sejong project is designed around Nvidia’s DSX AI factory platform and is part of South Korea’s wider push to build sovereign AI infrastructure. Naver plans to deploy Vera Rubin and Blackwell systems at the site and use the capacity to support Korean-language AI services, cloud offerings and model development, while South Korea’s broader national program targets 8.4 gigawatts of AI data-center capacity by 2029 and 18.4 gigawatts by 2035. The project’s scale-up underscores both the ambition of Korea’s AI buildout and the practical constraints around financing, grid access and power delivery that will determine whether the 2028 milestone is met.