Nvidia has locked in years of memory supply from SK Hynix, and the deal is large enough to matter to anyone shopping for a phone. Announced late Friday in San Francisco, the SK Group and Nvidia partnership is described in the companies’ joint announcement as worth more than $500 billion over a number of years, covering both AI data centre construction and long-term AI memory supply.
The specifics: SK Telecom will build a 2-gigawatt Nvidia Vera Rubin DSX AI factory in Korea, with the first site due online in 2027 and running SK Hynix HBM4. Nvidia and SK Hynix have separately committed to securing and co-developing next-generation AI memory. The two sides have signed letters of intent rather than a final contract, and Nvidia is also putting $1 billion into Korean cloud firm Naver.
Raj Mirpuri, Nvidia enterprise vice president, told reporters on a call what the arrangement is for, according to CNBC: “The expansion will include a co-develop opportunity for us on the next-generation SK Hynix AI memory, and this will help us secure a stable supply of HBM memory.”
Why an AI memory deal shows up in phone prices
Phones don’t use HBM. Your Galaxy or Pixel runs LPDDR5X, a different product built for low power rather than raw bandwidth. But both come out of the same DRAM manufacturers, and SK Hynix is one of only three that matter alongside Samsung and Micron. Wafer capacity and advanced packaging lines committed to HBM are capacity not available for the memory that goes into handsets — that is androidpure’s own read of the mechanism, not something either company said on Friday, and neither Nvidia nor SK Hynix addressed consumer or mobile memory at all in this announcement.
What makes that read hard to dismiss is that the downstream effects are already on the record this week. Google confirmed Pixel 11 price increases, with a Google vice president pointing at RAM costs. Qualcomm has told customers Snapdragon prices are going up by a double-digit percentage for chips shipping after September. Samsung raised the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra and Z Flip8 by $100 each over their predecessors. None of that is speculation about 2027 — it is what phone buyers are being asked to pay now.
What actually changed on Friday
Not the price of anything, immediately. What changed is the time horizon. Until now the memory squeeze could be read as a cyclical spike — supply tight, prices high, eventually corrects. A multi-year, half-trillion-dollar commitment with a data centre that doesn’t even switch on until 2027 reads differently. It is the shortage being written into contracts rather than waited out.
That matters because of who holds leverage in this market. AI buyers sign long-term, locked agreements at prices they can absorb because a data centre’s economics tolerate expensive memory. Phone makers buy against thinner margins, and phone buyers hold no contract at all — they are the residual claimant, absorbing whatever is passed down. If you have been holding off on a new phone in the expectation that memory prices normalise and handset prices follow, this deal is a reason to stop waiting for that and simply judge devices on what they cost today.
Worth keeping in proportion: letters of intent are not signed supply contracts, capacity plans get revised, and DRAM is a famously cyclical business that has broken every confident forecast made about it. But nothing announced on Friday points toward cheaper phone memory, and quite a lot of it points the other way.
Sources: CNBC
