Samsung and SK Hynix Rally After $950 Billion AI Chip Supply Pacts

South Korea's flagship chipmakers recovered a measure of lost ground on Monday after a weekend of dealmaking in San Francisco produced roughly $950 billion in long-term AI chip supply agreements between Seoul's semiconductor champions and the largest American buyers of computing hardware. The Kospi opened 1.7 percent higher and finished up 1.28 percent at 6,776.47, according to market data compiled by TradingKey, with Samsung Electronics closing 2.61 percent higher at 256,000 won and SK Hynix holding most of a premarket surge that had reached 4.21 percent before the open.

The bounce followed one of the harshest stretches for Korean equities this year. The benchmark index shed 5.72 percent on Friday to close at 6,690.62, with Samsung down 7.59 percent and SK Hynix off 8.34 percent, tracking a 4.25 percent slide in the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index as investors soured on the economics of the AI buildout. Against that backdrop, the weekend announcements served two purposes at once: a strategic realignment of the global memory business and a well-timed confidence signal for a rattled home market.

Dealmaking on the Sidelines of a Presidential Visit

The agreements were disclosed during President Lee Jae-myung's visit to the United States, at a gathering billed as the South Korea-US San Francisco AI Summit. SK Group signed a letter of intent with Nvidia that CNBC reported could be worth $500 billion over a number of years, an arrangement that reserves high-bandwidth memory output for the GPU maker and includes the construction of large-scale data centers expected to come online in 2027. The group layered on roughly $250 billion in long-term supply cooperation with Microsoft and other American technology companies, taking SK's total to about $750 billion, according to a breakdown published by BigGo Finance.

Samsung Electronics took a different route to the same destination. The company signed a memorandum of understanding with Broadcom valued at about $200 billion through 2030, spanning advanced high-bandwidth memory, contract manufacturing at process nodes below two nanometers, and advanced packaging. The Broadcom tie-up plays to Samsung's pitch that it is the only supplier able to combine memory, logic and packaging under one roof, a point its semiconductor chief Jeon Young-hyun pressed in remarks accompanying the announcement. Samsung Chairman Lee Jae-yong reinforced the courtship in person, visiting OpenAI's headquarters on July 25, BigGo Finance reported.

Memory Becomes the Chokepoint

The scale of the numbers reflects a structural shift in the AI hardware economy. For two years the binding constraint on data center construction was the supply of accelerator chips themselves. Increasingly, the bottleneck has migrated to the high-bandwidth memory stacked beside those processors, a market that Samsung and SK Hynix dominate alongside Micron. By locking in Korean output years ahead, Nvidia, Broadcom and Microsoft are effectively buying insurance against a shortage that could stall their own product roadmaps, while the Korean suppliers convert cyclical commodity revenue into something closer to contracted infrastructure income.

The caveats matter. A letter of intent is not a purchase order, and a memorandum of understanding binds no one to a delivery schedule. The $950 billion headline aggregates frameworks that stretch across many years and depend on AI demand meeting projections that some investors, judging by last week's selloff, no longer take on faith. Still, the direction of travel is unambiguous: the AI chip supply chain is being organized around bilateral, multi-year commitments rather than spot-market purchasing, and South Korea has positioned itself at the center of that architecture.

Naver's $10 Billion Infrastructure Bet

The summit also produced the largest external investment in a Korean internet platform to date. Naver secured a combined $10 billion from Nvidia and Brookfield, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported, with Nvidia planning a $1 billion equity purchase and Brookfield signing a nonbinding term sheet to fund up to $9 billion. The capital will finance an expansion of Naver's GAK Sejong hyperscale data center from an initial 55 megawatts to 200 megawatts, built on Nvidia's DSX platform, according to the announcement distributed through Nvidia's newsroom. Naver has said it ultimately intends to scale its deployment to a gigawatt of capacity running roughly 100,000 GPUs based on the Vera Rubin architecture.

Founder Lee Hae-jin said the company would lean on its global partnerships to "foster a sovereign AI ecosystem" and strengthen South Korea's competitiveness in the technology, according to remarks distributed through Nvidia's newsroom. Nvidia and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology separately unveiled a joint research laboratory in Seoul focused on agentic AI, extending the partnership from commercial supply into the research base. Investors responded emphatically: Naver jumped 7.71 percent on Monday, among the strongest blue-chip performances on the Kospi.

Rebound With Conditions Attached

The regional picture was less uniform than the Seoul rally suggested. Japan's Nikkei 225 opened higher but finished essentially flat at 64,651.98, with SoftBank Group unchanged and memory maker Kioxia falling 4.71 percent, a move that hints at how decisively the weekend's AI chip supply pacts tilt the competitive field toward Korean producers. Kim Dae-joon, an analyst at Korea Investment & Securities quoted by BigGo Finance, described the moment as one in which a recovery in semiconductor share prices has become possible, though he framed it as contingent on AI investment expectations holding firm.

That contingency is the story beneath the story. The Kospi's Monday gain retraced only a fraction of Friday's 5.72 percent drop, and the premarket enthusiasm in Samsung and SK Hynix faded somewhat by the close. Traders bought the announcement; they did not fully reverse the prior week's judgment that AI infrastructure spending has run ahead of demonstrated returns.

Earnings Will Decide Whether the Floor Holds

The durability of the rebound now rests on numbers rather than communiques. SK Hynix reports second-quarter results on July 29, and securities analysts in Seoul have flagged this week's earnings releases from the two chipmakers as a potential inflection point for a volatile market. Strong high-bandwidth memory shipments and firm pricing would validate the logic of the weekend's commitments; any sign of softening orders would revive the doubts that drove Friday's rout.

For Seoul, the strategic wager is larger than one earnings cycle. The government has attached national ambitions to the AI chip supply relationship with Washington, from sovereign data centers to university research capacity, and the weekend's agreements bind the country's two most valuable companies to American demand for the better part of a decade. If the AI buildout sustains its current trajectory, South Korea has secured itself an annuity at the heart of it. If the buildout stalls, the world's most concentrated memory industry will have tied its fortunes to a single trade at precisely the moment investors began to question it.