Samsung, SK Group, and Hyundai strategize optimal deployment of Nvidia GPUs across manufacturing and services.
Korean conglomerates are rapidly developing comprehensive semiconductor utilization strategies in anticipation of a substantial GPU influx. On October 31, during a visit to Korea for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced he would be supplying 260,000 cutting-edge chips to South Korea's government and businesses in the country, catalyzing coordinated investment across major Korean firms.
Naver has emerged as the quickest mover, securing 60,000 GPUs from Nvidia. The company's artificial intelligence strategy, released Thursday, commits over 1 trillion won to GPU purchases in 2026 — approximately twice what it invested in 2025 — building on prior investments of 130 billion won in 2023 and 230 billion won in 2024. Naver will deploy its newly acquired GPUs to advance a proprietary AI model the company is developing, establish physical AI platforms and services, and develop its "Agent N" AI assistant service. The company aims to expand its corporate cloud service, based in data centers in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province, and Sejong City, into the physical AI sector for manufacturing applications.
Samsung and SK, South Korea's memory semiconductor giants, will focus on upgrading existing chip fabrication infrastructure. Samsung will disperse over 50,000 GPUs across its domestic and international factories to develop AI-based "smart factories" and advance its own robotics technology. SK will allocate 2,000 Nvidia chips to SK Hynix's new facility near its chip cluster in Yongin, where it will pursue a "digital twin" service enabling virtual simulation of production lines to improve fabrication. The remaining 50,000 chips will be deployed to an AI data center SK has partnered with Amazon Web Services to build in Ulsan, Korea's largest manufacturing hub, for commercial AI applications.
Hyundai Motor Group will use its Nvidia allocation to introduce digital twins for its existing affiliate production lines while developing robot and autonomous driving capabilities. Like SK, Hyundai has announced plans to establish a new domestic AI data center, signaling its intention to expand beyond internal AI development into broader commercial applications.