🇰🇷 South Korea: AI money in and out

€3 billion Series D (about $3.5 billion) at over €21 billion post-money (about $24 billion). Led by Samsung, co-led by Scaleup Europe Fund (EQT) and PSG; a16z, Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, Advent and BlackRock participate.

Korea's science ministry plans ₩3.85tn for 140 Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 racks (10,080 GPUs), ₩27.5bn per rack.

SK Hynix broke ground on its $4bn+ HBM packaging plant in West Lafayette, Indiana; mass production slated for H2 2029.

Nvidia becomes Naver's third-largest shareholder to accelerate Korean AI factories; the deal is tied to $9 billion of project financing (Brookfield). Payment expected 06/11/2026.

Samsung signs a memorandum with Broadcom on memory, foundry and advanced packaging through 2030, estimated by Samsung at about $200 billion.

Nvidia and SK sign a multi-year initiative of up to ~$500 billion: HBM4 supply for Vera Rubin, memory co-development and a 2 GW SK Telecom data center with Nvidia systems from 2027.

Korea's National Growth Fund is giving Samsung ₩2.5tn in low-rate financing for its Pyeongtaek Line 5 AI chip cluster.

Microsoft, Google, Nvidia and Amazon have offered to directly finance new SK Hynix production lines and tools to secure memory supply.

Google and Microsoft are negotiating three-year DRAM contracts with SK Hynix with price floors and prepayments of 10-30% of contract value.

Samsung is negotiating 3-5 year memory deals with Google and Microsoft; Microsoft's prepayment could exceed $10bn, deducted if purchases fall short.

According to industry sources, Samsung will be the only HBM4 supplier for Titan, OpenAI's first chip, designed with Broadcom and manufactured by TSMC.

Samsung and AMD signed an MoU making Samsung the primary HBM4 supplier for Instinct MI455X and DDR5 for Helios, and will explore a foundry deal.

At GTC Jensen Huang confirmed Samsung Foundry is making Nvidia's Groq 3 LPU on 4nm, shipping in H2 2026.

Korean media report SK Hynix is the sole supplier of HBM3E for Microsoft's Maia 200 AI accelerator.

Seoul launched a ₩150tn five-year National Growth Fund (₩75tn state-backed) with 20% for AI; in 2026 ₩6tn goes to AI and ₩4.2tn to chips.

Under the 15% tariff deal, Korea will invest $350bn in the US: $150bn in shipbuilding and $200bn cash, capped at $20bn a year, into chips, energy, AI and quantum.

At APEC Nvidia announces 260,000 Blackwell GPUs for Korea; 50,000 go to Samsung for an AI semiconductor megafactory.

The SK group (SK Hynix, SK Telecom) receives 50,000 Nvidia GPUs for an AI cloud for manufacturing and chip digital twins.

Hyundai Motor Group deploys 50,000 Blackwell GPUs for autonomous driving, robotics and factories, with a joint investment of about $3 billion with Nvidia in Korea.

Naver Cloud will operate 60,000 Nvidia GPUs for its AI services and a physical AI platform.

The Seoul government receives 50,000 GPUs for the national AI computing center and sovereign models.

At APEC, AWS pledged over $5bn by 2031 for new AI data centers in Incheon and Gyeonggi, on top of its Ulsan campus with SK.

Letter of intent for DRAM/HBM supplies to Stargate: together with SK Hynix up to 900,000 DRAM wafers a month.

Letter of intent for HBM/DRAM memory supplies to Stargate; joint target with Samsung of up to 900,000 wafers a month.

Samsung's largest foundry contract: AI6 chips made at the Taylor (Texas) plant. Musk: $16.5 billion is the minimum.

AWS and SK Group are building a 103MW AI campus in Ulsan (expandable to 1GW), run by SK Telecom; total ≈7tn won, about $4bn from AWS.

Samsung bought Germany's FläktGroup, a data-center air and liquid cooling specialist, from Triton — its biggest deal since 2017.

The US government finalizes $4.745 billion for Samsung's Taylor (Texas) plants, 26% less than the preliminary deal; it is the plant that will make Tesla's AI chips.