First he tied up Samsung, now SK Hynix. At the RAM crisis party, Nvidia has secured the cake

In any group of friends, there is one person who always tries to get along with everyone. In the technology world, that person is Nvidia. The American giant that until not so long ago was the one who dominated the conversation in the field of video game hardware, now it is synonymous with artificial intelligence. Nvidia is shaping the sector with billion-dollar investmentsbut also with its hardware.

The H200 and the Blackwell B200 are the most coveted chips in the sectorwhich leads to everyone wants that platform and, therefore, Nvidia is one of the whales that is drinking the global stock of RAM. For Vera Rubin, their new platform, they need much more memory and, after reaching an agreement to ensure the best available that Samsung makesthey have achieved another with the other leg of the global RAM market: SK Hynix.

And this is about data centersbut also eye-catching RTX Spark chiprobotics, accelerating development times and how consumers have years left to continue suffering with the supply of chips.

Nvidia, SK Hynix and the deal to manufacture everything

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is traveling through Seoul. This time his objective was not to visit the new Samsung facilities (relations with Samsung They are already more than consolidated), but to secure the other South Korean (and world) memory chip giant: SK Hynix.

During their visit, the two CEOs staged a multi-year agreement by which Nvidia will have priority access to the most refined memory coming out of the SK Hynix foundry. Because Nvidia already warned in January that this year it would need all the silicon possible, and seeing the roadmap it is something that is perfectly understood.

As we say, they are immersed in the Vera Rubin AI platform for the training and inference of artificial intelligence models; have just presented the RTX Spark chips in response to Apple Silicon and Qualcomm chips for computers Windows ARM and then there’s another leg that we don’t talk about as much, but that they are pushing hard and that also requires a lot of memory chips: the Jetson Thor robotics platform.

In it releasethe two state that this is an agreement to speed up development times on this hardware for AI. This is something that requires long development cycles, but also a lot of money to sustain the global demand for memory due to data centers for AI. This deal goes there.

Because it is not so much about ensuring high bandwidth memory (something that Nvidia already had to be the great whale of the sector), but to improve the infrastructure so that the new generations arrive at the pace that the development of AI requires. In fact, Chey Tae-won, CEO of SK Group, highlights the same thing: “together we are co-developing the next generation of memory for AI factories, applying AI to semiconductor design and manufacturing.”

That is to say, It is not a simple question of supply (which also, since 60-70% of SK Hynix’s HBM4 memory goes to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin), but to apply AI tools (which Nvidia has) for the design and manufacturing of semiconductors with the aforementioned objective of shortening times. This objective is something that is being pursued worldwide, and the company itself SK Hynix together with Samsung collaborate in a megacenter in the United States to streamline all these processes.

As a result of this agreement, it is very possible that SK Hynix get its goal of setting up a fully autonomous semiconductor factory by 2030 (something that, again, share with Samsung).

Now, what about the goal of those we want a RAM stick or one Steam Deck that doesn’t hit price increases of 300 euros at once? Well, unfortunately, we are going to continue eating this situation of debauchery when it comes to building AI platforms and gigantic data centers.

During his visit, Huang himself commented that he expects the global shortage to last for years because the entire supply chain of this new industry depends on these chips and that demand is very high. In their wordsit is something that “will persist for several years”. They are not new statements either, since Huang gave about seven or eight years to the unbridled investment.

And more important than all this, Nvidia, right now, has the four chip giants eating from his hand. SK Hynix and Samsung with memory and their factories for new generation memory. TSMC has turned Nvidia into your client A. And ASML that is what manufactures machines to make advanced chips It is the one that supplies those tools to the three mentioned.

In Xataka | China already has a GPU that competes with Nvidia’s RTX 3060. The bad thing is that it arrives five years late and worse