Special Edition: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Investing in South Korea

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Monica Ricks** (0:07)
I'm Monica Ricks in the Bloomberg Newsroom in New York with a special conversation. Bloomberg Tech host Ed Ludlow sat down with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to discuss the tech giant's latest investments in South Korea, which includes teaming up with SK Group to build new data centers and investing a billion dollars in internet and cloud service provider Naver.
Let's listen in to a portion of their conversation coming not long after the Nvidia CEO appeared at a Korean AI summit.

**Ed Ludlow** (0:35)
Jensen, I think we just start with the basics.
The career is incredibly important to the AI build out globally. We'll get into high bandwidth memory, but just from this summit, from the president being here, what is the takeaway? What is it you're trying to achieve?

**Jensen Huang** (0:49)
Well, we're announcing a whole bunch of partnerships with them. This is the golden ages for Korea as you know. Their semiconductor business is booming. Their industrial business is booming. This is a country that has the ability to help the world build out the AI infrastructure, that they're incredibly adapt at adopting new technologies. And it's a really technologically forward-laning society. And they love using AI. AI has really diffused throughout their society and their industry. And so this is a great time for them. We're announcing several things. We announce a big partnership with SK Group, where our companies are going to enter into a business partnership, where we do over $500 billion of business with each other, whether it's consumption and purchasing of memories or selling AI supercomputers to them as they scale out 2 gigawatts of AI factories.
There's a whole bunch of other announcements.
We're investing a billion dollars in Naver to help, they're the Korea's leading AI cloud. They're going to scale up in Korea up to 2, they're going to scale up 200 megawatts, I think it is, and they're going to expand across the world. And so we have a whole bunch of announcements that we're making today.

**Ed Ludlow** (2:07)
With the expanded SK relationship, there's also more direct involvement with Nvidia on the roadmap for HBM, future generations of HBM.
Talk about that. I remember you being on stage earlier this year saying, five years ago, we told our supply chain what was going to happen. And it did happen. And you gave some credit to the memory makers in going with you on that journey. But clearly, you want to be involved in the direction of travel for future generations of HBM.

**Jensen Huang** (2:36)
Yeah, we're working together on, of course, we started with HBM2, worked on HBM3, 3E, 4, 4E, and then beyond. And so we've got a whole roadmap of memories that we're working on together.
It is also the case that the semiconductor industry has really changed. And the reason for that, because we used to build computers for people to use, and we're going to still continue to build incredible computers. These are now processing AIs for humans to collaborate with. But in the future, we also have AI agents and robots, and they're going to be using computers. So instead of just a billion people using computers, we're going to have a hundred billion agents and billions of robots all using computers. The computer industry that's built on top of the chip industry surely is not big enough. And so this is one of the realizations of the semiconductor industry, that now computers are built not just for people to use, but computers are being built for computers to use. My guess is that the semiconductor industry is probably going to have to be 10 times larger than it is today over the next decade or so.
And so working with our partners in Korea and around the world, to scale up the supply chain and the semiconductors so that we're prepared for this AI future is really important.

**Ed Ludlow** (3:54)
I've had the opportunity to ask you about this more than once this year, but how much do you need the Korean economy to get going to increase the supply of HBM bits for Nvidia based systems wherever they are?

**Jensen Huang** (4:05)
Well, we don't have enough bits. We're constrained in HBM memories, LPDDR memories. We're constrained in just about every part of the supply chain. We're even constrained now with land and power and construction workers to set up the data centers. I think this is one of the areas that is going to make sure that we continue to build out in a throttled way for a decade. The reason for that is because these infrastructure, unlike electronic devices like PCs and phones and things like that, it's really, really hard to scale up land, power, and shell.