(Jan 9): The chairman of SK Hynix Inc’s parent and Nvidia Corp co-founder Jensen Huang met on Wednesday to discuss artificial intelligence (AI), suggesting the two companies are exploring ways to deepen one of the most important relationships in AI hardware.

SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won and Huang talked about areas including moving AI into the physical realm. Both leaders discussed SK Hynix’s high-bandwidth memory chips, which work with Nvidia’s AI accelerators. The South Korean company has been quickening its pace of development to make sure it keeps up with Nvidia’s demands for faster evolution, Chey told reporters at CES in Las Vegas.

SK Hynix shares surged more than 5% in Seoul, extending a remarkable gain that made the South Korean memory chip maker one of the industry’s best performers of 2024. It became the leading provider of essential memory to Nvidia during the post-ChatGPT AI boom, pushing aside long-time rival Samsung Electronics Co.

Huang has discussed extending AI into more of the physical world to develop tools that can “proceed, reason, plan and act”. That will transform industries worth US$50 trillion (RM225.25 trillion), according to Nvidia. Chey said he told Huang at their meeting that South Korea, a manufacturing powerhouse, is uniquely positioned to work with Nvidia on that front.  

Both companies have benefited from the insatiable appetite that major companies and governments have for Nvidia’s chips, the gold standard for training AI algorithms.

SK Group is now focusing on AI data centres to drive future growth, part of a strategy to transform South Korea’s second biggest conglomerate into a technology-driven business. 

SK Hynix’s exhibition at CES highlighted the company’s most advanced HBM chips — 16-layer HBM3E — as well as enterprise data storage solutions for data centres.

Uploaded by Tham Yek Lee