As competition to expand AI infrastructure accelerates, a big deal has been struck to secure the memory supply chain. Nvidia and SK Hynix said on Sunday they had signed a long-term technology partnership to develop next-generation memory and accelerate semiconductor design and manufacturing to support the buildout of AI factories worldwide.

The deal aims to ensure a stable supply of advanced memory, which requires a long development cycle. SK Hynix plans to co-develop memory for Nvidia's Vera Rubin AI supercomputer, Vera CPU, RTX Spark PC and Jetson Thor robotics computing platform in line with Nvidia's AI infrastructure roadmap.

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang (젠슨 황) said, "AI factories are the engine of the next industrial revolution, and advanced memory is essential to unleash their performance." He added, "We will jointly develop next-generation memory and support the expansion of AI infrastructure worldwide."

AI technology will also be directly applied to semiconductor design and manufacturing processes. SK Hynix is using Nvidia's CUDA-X library in TCAD, a technology that simulates circuit pattern design on computers, and in computational lithography workflows to boost processing speed. It is also running AI-based physics simulations through the PhysicsNeMo framework. The two companies plan to expand these tools into the electronic design automation ecosystem and lay the groundwork for three-way cooperation with chipmakers and EDA software suppliers.

Building digital twins to automate factory operations is another key pillar of the cooperation. SK Hynix is developing a fab digital twin that renders semiconductor manufacturing environments in 3D using Nvidia's Omniverse library and an OpenUSD pipeline. It is combining this with cuOpt, a GPU-accelerated route-optimization engine, and the Metropolis platform to improve decision-making efficiency inside fabs, including the operation of autonomous mobile robots.

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won (최태원) said, "SK Hynix and Nvidia have laid the groundwork for this over several years, and this partnership is the result that shows the depth of cooperation between the two companies."