NVIDIA schließt KI-Allianz mit Südkorea und verspricht bis 2030 260.000 GPUs im Wert von 9,8 Milliarden US-Dollar

The significance:

– Lee pledged to acquire 50,000 by 2030, so this outpaces his original plans by 5X

– Both NVIDIA and the S.Korean gov’t confirms that this brings S.Korea to the third spot in the number of GPUs after the US and China

– 50,000 goes to the S.Korean gov’t and 21,000 goes to private companies.

– The only concern is that about 50K is allocated to Naver, which means they get a huge leg up over their competitors (Upstage, NC, SKT, and LG) when it comes to competing for Korea’s top 2 National AI competition. Naver is getting it because they have been an NVIDIA partner for a long time.

That’s a lot of reliance on Nvidia, the « B2C branch » of TSMC, that has most of its eggs in Taiwan. It’s money not spent on Samsung.

I was hoping for some sign of Samsung getting into AI chip fab, but this seems to confirm the opposite; they’re just buying NVidia chips and acting like it’s a win.