NVIDIA and SK Hynix announce multi-year partnership plan to ensure supply of advanced storage

Author: Zhao Ying, Wall Street Insights

On Monday, NVIDIA and SK Hynix officially announced the establishment of a multi-year technology partnership. Both sides will jointly develop next-generation AI storage chips around this effort, and they have also locked in long-term supply assurance. With this collaboration now taking shape, it directly responds to the market’s ongoing concerns about storage supply bottlenecks during the expansion of AI infrastructure.

On Sunday evening, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, during a meeting with senior executives of SK Group in Seoul, made it clear that the storage shortage situation “will persist for several years.” According to Reuters, Huang said at dinner with SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and other executives, “from wafers to packaging to silicon photonics, everything in the entire industry supply chain is in short supply, because demand is simply too high.”

The partnership announcement was released at a highly sensitive moment for the market. Last Friday, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged more than 10% in a single day, marking the largest one-day drop since March 2020. SK Hynix’s stock price also fell sharply as a result. In pre-market trading on Monday on NEXTRADE, both SK Hynix’s and Samsung’s share prices once briefly fell by more than 10%. Whether this official announcement can boost market confidence is something investors are closely watching.

The collaboration covers multiple product lines, and joint R&D runs through the full AI stack

According to NVIDIA’s official announcement, the core of this multi-year agreement is to closely link SK Hynix’s storage R&D roadmap with NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure roadmap. The two sides will jointly develop next-generation storage products for NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin AI supercomputer, Vera CPU, RTX Spark personal computers, and the Jetson Thor robotics computing platform, covering three major market directions: AI infrastructure, personal AI, and physical AI.

In its statement, NVIDIA emphasized that the agreement clearly supports supply assurance for advanced storage, with the goal of addressing structural challenges such as long development cycles for advanced storage products, complex manufacturing processes, and capital-intensive investment—ensuring that storage supply can keep pace with the ongoing global expansion of “AI factories.”

In the statement, Jensen Huang said, “AI factories are the engine of the next industrial revolution, and advanced storage is crucial to their performance. SK Hynix is an outstanding partner of NVIDIA, and it has played a core role in delivering advanced storage technology for NVIDIA’s AI computing platforms.” Chey Tae-won added, “SK Hynix and NVIDIA have been building toward this for years. This partnership relationship reflects the depth of our collaboration.”

Technology cooperation extends to chip design and intelligent manufacturing

In addition to joint R&D on storage products, the companies’ cooperation also extends to semiconductor design and manufacturing. SK Hynix will use NVIDIA’s CUDA-X library and the PhysicsNeMo framework to accelerate semiconductor simulation, technology computer-aided design (TCAD) workflows, and the computations of internal engineering code, and it will explore a three-party collaboration model with electronic design automation software providers.

In intelligent manufacturing, SK Hynix will combine NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform, the OpenUSD workflow, and the cuOpt decision optimization engine to build a digital twin system for wafer fabs, laying the foundation for fully autonomous wafer fab operations. The two sides will also explore connecting digital twins with existing legacy software and agentic AI workflows to drive automation and intelligence in manufacturing decision-making.

Amid the shadow of Friday’s sharp selloff, the market waits for pre-market signals

The market backdrop for this partnership announcement is fairly complex. Last Friday, the U.S. semiconductor sector suffered a major slump. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell by more than 10% in a single day, the largest one-day decline in nearly six years, and SK Hynix’s share price also dropped sharply in tandem.

Entering this week, NEXTRADE pre-market trading data showed that both SK Hynix’s and Samsung’s share prices had once fallen by more than 10% in pre-market trading, and overall market sentiment remained cautious. On Friday evening, multiple market participants had already expressed concerns about potential further selloffs when markets open on Monday.

Whether NVIDIA and SK Hynix’s official partnership announcement can alter market expectations and provide support for the semiconductor sector will be a key focus to watch after the Asian markets open on Monday.