SEOUL, July 25 (AJP) - South Korean companies and American technology giants will pursue semiconductor cooperation worth a combined $950 billion over the next five years, the presidential Blue House said Saturday, putting a price on the summit President Lee Jae Myung convened in San Francisco a day earlier.
Kim Yong-beom, the presidential policy chief, gave the figure at a briefing at the press center in San Francisco, breaking down the results of the San Francisco AI Summit across the three pillars of the government's Three Mega Projects: semiconductors, AI data centers and physical AI. The total comes to about $950 billion (1,375 trillion won).
The commitments are frameworks rather than signed orders. The Blue House said the announced scale covers memorandums of understanding and long-term cooperation plans, with actual investment and supply to follow as contracts are executed and projects proceed. Even so, the scale is difficult to overstate. Spread over five years, $950 billion works out to about $190 billion a year, close to the entire annual revenue of either Nvidia or Samsung Electronics, and the total nearly doubles the roughly $520 billion the two Korean chipmakers pledged in June toward new domestic fabrication plants.
The largest single piece belongs to SK. The group will pursue long-term supply cooperation for advanced memory chips with Nvidia and other global technology companies worth $750 billion over five years, the Blue House said. That figure resolves a number that had hung over the summit since Friday, when Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang told Lee that a partnership with SK Group would reach $500 billion. No documentation followed his remark. The official tally now puts SK's memory cooperation half again higher, with Huang's figure apparently representing the Nvidia portion of a wider multi-buyer arrangement.
Samsung Electronics signed a memorandum of understanding with Broadcom covering $200 billion over five years, spanning advanced memory supply and foundry cooperation to manufacture AI chips. The agreement pairs Samsung's contract chipmaking business with the company designing custom AI processors for several of the world's largest cloud operators.
In data centers, Korean and global companies will pursue investment cooperation on roughly five gigawatts of AI data center capacity running about two million graphics processing units. For scale, the government had secured 260,000 advanced GPUs as of this spring, and its first-phase national plan targets eight gigawatts. SK Telecom agreed with Nvidia on support for building and expanding AI data centers of up to two gigawatts, with priority allocation of Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin systems, and will pursue investment in a gigawatt-class domestic AI data center project with Anthropic. Naver signed a strategic investment agreement with Nvidia and an infrastructure supply contract with the global investment firm Brookfield to build an AI factory complex worth a combined $10 billion.
In physical AI, Hyundai Motor Group and Nvidia will jointly build what they call a robot reference platform, a standardized base for developing and validating AI robots that universities and startups can build on. The Blue House also said an autonomous vehicle foundry plan was announced with Waymo, without giving details. Samsung SDS signed a strategic partnership with Anthropic to jointly develop new AI markets and train AI engineers.
The results land two days after Kim told foreign correspondents the figures companies were preparing could exceed the 4,700 trillion won ($3.2 billion) headline attached to the June investment package, and they close the loop the summit opened. Lee's San Francisco AI Declaration on Friday promised that South Korea would anchor the global AI supply chain while serving as the place where the technology is put to work first. Saturday's tally is the first accounting of what that pitch brought back.
"This San Francisco AI Summit was a venue for combining South Korea's semiconductor competitiveness and its AI infrastructure, model and physical AI capabilities with the technology and capital of global big tech, to build an investment and cooperation ecosystem across the full AI stack," Kim said. "It carries meaning as the starting point of a global project that will lead the world's AI industry."
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