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Hwang's "Rescue" of the South Korean Stock Market: SK Hynix's Memory Locked, Chip Shortage to Continue

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NVIDIA Deepens Ties to South Korean Supply Chain, AI Memory Demand to Outstrip Supply Long Term

Original Article Title: "Huang Renxun's Dramatic 'Rescue' of the South Korean Stock Market"
Original Article Author: Suyang, Tencent Technology

On June 5, the South Korean stock market experienced a "Black Friday," with the KOSPI index closing down by 5.54%. When trading opened on June 8, the intraday decline once expanded to over 8%, triggering a circuit breaker on the trading platform, and both Samsung and SK Hynix fell by nearly 10%.

Amidst market jitters, Huang Renxun's visit dramatically took on the role of "market savior."

Previously, on Sunday night, June 7 local time in South Korea, Huang Renxun held a "dinner party" with SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, SK Hynix CEO Lee Seok-Hee, and others.

After the dinner, Huang Renxun confirmed to the media present that NVIDIA's newly launched Vera CPU will use SK Hynix DRAM; the two sides are preparing for a "mega-scale cooperation" for the latter half of this year and next year; regarding the current memory chip shortage, he believed it would last for several years.

Subsequently, NVIDIA and SK Hynix officially announced a long-term technology cooperation agreement, involving AI supercomputers extending to robotics, digital twins, and semiconductor manufacturing.

During the press conference, Huang Renxun even directly pumped up the stock, saying, "If you are a shareholder of an AI company, you will be happy, as their current prices are very low."

01 Locking in SK Hynix Memory

Vera is NVIDIA's first independent data center-specific CPU, competing against Intel's Xeon product line, AMD's Epyc chips, and self-developed projects by major cloud service providers like Amazon Graviton.

In this new battleground, NVIDIA has from the beginning anchored its memory supply to SK Hynix.

On June 7, NVIDIA and SK Hynix officially announced the establishment of a long-term technology partnership focused on NVIDIA's AI infrastructure roadmap to jointly develop the next-generation memory that matches it.

It is understood that the cooperation between the two sides covers a series of personal and cloud-based product lines such as NVIDIA's Vera Rubin AI supercomputer, Vera CPU, PC with RTX Spark, and Jetson Thor robot computing platform.

The announcement stated that the collaboration aims to secure the supply of advanced memory to address the longer development cycles, complex manufacturing processes, and high capital investment of such products, thereby supporting the continuous construction of global AI factories.

The announcement also listed SK Hynix's expansion into several new markets that NVIDIA is pioneering, including AI infrastructure, personal AI, and physical AI.

02 AI Backs Chip Manufacturing

In addition to supplying memory, SK Hynix has started incorporating NVIDIA's AI technology into its chip design and manufacturing process.

Similar collaboration has previously been implemented at TSMC, most notably in "computational lithography."

According to the announcement, SK Hynix is leveraging NVIDIA's CUDA-X library and AI to accelerate semiconductor simulation, covering technology computer-aided design (TCAD) and computational lithography processes.

The two parties are also working on extending these tools to the semiconductor electronic design automation (EDA) and simulation ecosystem, laying the groundwork for a three-way collaboration among chip manufacturers, NVIDIA, and EDA software vendors.

This means that the collaboration between the two parties is no longer limited to internal use by SK Hynix but is exploring a model that can be extended to the entire semiconductor industry.

In the manufacturing process, SK Hynix is advancing the development of wafer fab digital twin capabilities with the aim of achieving fully autonomous factory operations. The foundation of this work is the NVIDIA Omniverse platform. With the help of the Omniverse library and OpenUSD workflow, SK Hynix can build 3D factory scenes for visualizing, simulating, and optimizing complex semiconductor manufacturing environments.

At the operational level of the factory, these digital twin capabilities can also integrate with NVIDIA's cuOpt decision optimization engine and Metropolis platform to schedule autonomous mobile robots and other assets within the wafer fab.

The announcement also revealed that the two companies are exploring integrating the digital twin with existing legacy software and intelligent agent AI workflows, allowing AI systems to infer, autonomously perform tasks, and improve manufacturing decisions based on wafer fab data.

03 Six-Month Early Preparation

In October 2025, NVIDIA and SK Hynix announced a large-scale infrastructure collaboration ahead of schedule.

At that time, the SK Group was constructing an AI factory equipped with over 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs, with the first phase planned to be completed by the end of 2027. Once completed, this is expected to become one of the largest AI factories in South Korea.

The factory operates on a "GPU as a Service" model, open to SK Group subsidiaries and external organizations, aiming to accelerate Korea's industrial digital transformation and industrial innovation.

SK Telecom is also involved in the specific deployment work.

As an NVIDIA cloud partner, SK Telecom plans to use the NVIDIA RTX A6000 Blackwell server-grade GPU in Asia to build an Industrial AI Cloud, with an initial deployment scale of over 2000 GPUs dedicated to running Omniverse workloads, providing computational support for SK Hynix's semiconductor manufacturing, wafer fab digital twins, and internal AI agents.

During this visit to Korea, Jensen Huang also revealed some information: he is in discussions with the telecommunications companies because future AI will run on telecommunications networks. This aligns with the direction of collaboration SK Telecom is involved in.

04 Three Companies Secure HBM4 Orders

Despite NVIDIA signing a multi-year technical collaboration agreement with SK Hynix, NVIDIA did not put all its eggs in one basket when it comes to HBM4 supply.

Upon arriving in Seoul, Jensen Huang explicitly stated to reporters, "All three suppliers have been qualified. All three suppliers are in production, and they are all aggressively supporting Vera Rubin."

These three suppliers correspond to Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology.

In his keynote address at Computex in Taipei, Jensen Huang has confirmed that Vera Rubin is in full production and is planned for delivery in the third quarter of this year. This system is built around the NVIDIA Vera CPU and Rubin graphics core cluster, with each server rack system paired with TB-level HBM4 memory.

Looking at the actual progress of HBM4, SK Hynix is still in the lead.

Reuters reported in September last year that SK Hynix had completed internal certification of the HBM4 chip by then and had established a production system for customers, with the goal of preparing for mass production of 12-layer HBM4 products in the second half of 2025. Meritz Securities senior analyst Kim Sunwoo predicted at the time that thanks to early supply to key customers and the resulting first-mover advantage, SK Hynix's HBM market share in 2026 would remain just over 60%.

05 Chip Shortage to Last for Several Years

The situation of the three-way split in HBM4 supply does not mean that the supply pressure will ease.

After a Sunday dinner, Jensen Huang gave a rather pessimistic outlook. He told the media on-site that the memory chip shortage will not end soon. "The entire industry supply chain—from wafers to packaging to silicon photonics... everything is in shortage because demand is so high. This situation will last for several years."

The background to this statement is the almost insatiable demand for advanced memory in the global AI factory construction.

The shortage mentioned by Jensen Huang is not a lack of a certain material, but tight supply at almost every link in the industry chain. Every move by NVIDIA, such as the introduction of Vera Rubin, the promotion of AI factories, entry into personal AI and physical AI fields, is driving up the demand for memory. That's why he mentioned that all three HBM4 suppliers are competing to support Vera Rubin.

No one wants to fall behind in a situation of supply shortage.

During this trip to Korea, although the SK Group was a focus, it was not the entirety of Jensen Huang's schedule. Upon arrival, he revealed that he had arranged meetings with Hyundai, LG, SK, Samsung, and Naver. He also disclosed that NVIDIA is actively recruiting personnel for the new R&D center in Korea. From these movements, it is evident that NVIDIA is systematically deepening its connection with the entire Korean tech industry. The SK Group is a key part of it, but not the only part.