Nvidia expands in South Korea to strengthen its AI infrastructure network - Chicago Star Media

NVIDIA's expansion in South Korea represents a strategic move to strengthen its global AI infrastructure network, highlighting the company's recognition of South Korea's semiconductor industry signifi... Read original →

NVIDIA’s South Korea expansion is a strategic detour to mitigate geopolitical friction while anchoring closer to cutting-edge manufacturing. Its 3nm GPUs rely on EUV capacity from TSMC (Taiwan, China) and Samsung; a Korean footprint shortens integration cycles with SK Hynix’s HBM and Samsung’s logic foundry, accelerating AI chip-memory-system co-design. This move pressures ASML to deploy more EUV tools locally and spurs Korean OSATs to adopt CoWoS-like advanced packaging. Although U.S.-ROK export control alignment reduces supply chain rupture risk, any further U.S. restrictions on AI chips to China could thrust NVIDIA’s Korean operations into regulatory crosshairs, inflating compliance overhead. In response, AMD and Intel will likely fast-track partnerships with TSMC (Taiwan, China) and Japan’s Rapidus to secure non-Korean AI foundry capacity. Over the next 18 months, global AI infrastructure will fracture into regionally manufactured but globally designed stacks—with Korea poised to become Asia’s AI hardware nexus, albeit at the cost of heightened supply concentration risk.