South Korean and U.S. technology companies agreed to pursue $950 billion in semiconductor and AI partnerships over the next five years, President Lee Jae Myung’s office said Friday, as chipmakers scramble to keep pace with demand for the faster memory and processing hardware that power Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI developers.
Lee unveiled the figure in a keynote at an AI summit in San Francisco attended by roughly 150 executives, investors and researchers, where he also introduced what he called the “San Francisco AI Declaration,” a statement of South Korea’s ambitions for technological cooperation with the United States. “I’d like to present a vision for the future of AI and propose global cooperation to make it happen,” Lee said. He met separately beforehand with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan.
SK Group accounts for the largest share of the announced spending, with $750 billion in agreements anchored by a partnership between SK Hynix and Nvidia worth more than $500 billion covering large-scale AI data centers and next-generation memory supply. Under that arrangement, SK Telecom plans to build a 2-gigawatt data center powered by Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips and SK Hynix’s HBM4 high-bandwidth memory, due to come online in 2027.
Samsung Electronics separately signed a memorandum of understanding with Broadcom covering as much as $200 billion across memory chips, foundry services and advanced packaging. Samsung said it would help build Broadcom’s next-generation AI accelerator using Samsung’s high-bandwidth memory technology, along with sub-2-nanometer foundry manufacturing and advanced packaging.
Presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom said the data center commitments announced at the summit span a combined 5 gigawatts of capacity and roughly 2 million graphics processing units, with Anthropic alone accounting for 1 gigawatt; Kim said Amodei had signaled openness to further investment during a one-on-one meeting with Lee. “We have developed concrete investment and cooperation plans with global partners across every core area” of Korea’s semiconductor, data center and physical AI initiatives, Kim told reporters at a briefing following the summit.
SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said AI customers are now seeking far more memory than the industry had anticipated even a few months ago, citing recent conversations with executives at Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI and Broadcom. “I wouldn’t be surprised if, the next time I see [Huang], he’ll tell me those figures were too low and say, ‘I want more,’” Chey said, describing Nvidia’s own five-year memory projections as likely to prove conservative. Chey added that Broadcom’s Hock Tan had told him memory demand would probably outstrip available supply, that Anthropic was regularly checking on future chip availability as it builds out its own computing capacity, and that OpenAI had pressed SK to supply chips directly rather than through intermediaries.
Chey also said Anthropic was developing its own computing power, without elaborating — a possible reference to reporting that the AI lab is exploring designing its own chips. An Anthropic spokesperson said the company was always evaluating its options and draws on a range of chip suppliers as part of a deliberately diversified approach to computing. Amodei did not address the chip-design reports directly, saying only that Anthropic had signed supply agreements with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. Anthropic raised funding in May at a valuation of $965 billion, naming Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron as partners whose memory, storage and logic chips it considers critical to its supply chain.
The summit also produced smaller side agreements: Hyundai Motor Group unveiled an “autonomous vehicle foundry” plan with Waymo, Samsung SDS signed a strategic partnership with Anthropic to develop new AI markets and train AI engineers, and Naver said it would build $10 billion worth of AI data infrastructure through an investment agreement with Nvidia and a separate infrastructure supply deal with Canadian investment firm Brookfield Corp.
Lee is scheduled to attend a meeting in Silicon Valley on Saturday between South Korea’s National Pension Service, the world’s third-largest pension fund, and U.S. venture capital firms aimed at steering more investment toward South Korean startups. The San Francisco commitments build on a $576 billion state-backed industrial program Lee unveiled last month, anchored by Samsung and SK Hynix, to build semiconductor production clusters, physical AI ecosystems and AI data centers across South Korea.
