SK Group showcased its capabilities for meeting the fast-growing market demand for artificial intelligence (AI) during its 2025 SK AI Summit Monday, where Chairman Chey Tae-won emphasized “efficiency over scale” in the group’s approach to providing memory chips, infrastructure and services.

SK Group affiliates and partner companies across the semiconductor, energy, AI data center and agent services sectors joined the annual forum at Coex in southern Seoul, sharing the latest updates for their products and services to industry and academic leaders.

“The exponential growth in demand for computing power is far more serious, as supply cannot keep up,” Chey said during his keynote speech. “It is time to shift the paradigm from a competition of scale to a competition of efficiency.”

Chey said demand for AI computing power maintains a sharp growth trajectory with the rise of AI inferencing, which requires more tokens than current training-based models. He added that the trend is accelerating: As business-to-business AI adoption expands, agentic AI becomes more widespread and nations pursue their own sovereign AI initiatives.

He said that such “exponential growth in demand” is creating challenges for chipmakers, including SK hynix, to meet the market demand for AI-specific high-bandwidth memory (HBM), due to the long lag time required to expand supply and the difficulty of forecasting demand accurately.

He also pointed out that geopolitical factors, such as balancing between different countries’ demands and determining where to invest and where to supply, are making it even harder to manage production and distribution.

To address these “bottlenecks,” Chey said SK Group is focusing on “efficiency over scale."

SK hynix is set to begin full-fledged operation of its new HBM fab next year in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province. In 2027 it will complete the first fab in a cluster in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, that will have 24 times the capacity of the Cheongju plant's M15X fab when it is fully operational. Chey said that in carrying out these projects, the group is seeking to introduce breakthrough technologies such as ultra-high-capacity memory and cost-efficient, large-scale NAND flash memory products to be more efficient in meeting market demand. SK is also working on optimizing its data center operations by designing and managing them from the ground up to best support AI workloads.

“What we are focusing on now is solving AI problems with AI,” Chey said. “We are applying AI to both memory chip fabrication and data center operations to improve efficiency and speed through process optimization and virtualization. In particular, we have begun using AI in memory manufacturing through our collaboration with Nvidia, utilizing its Omniverse platform to dramatically enhance production efficiency.”

During Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s visit to Korea last week, SK Group and Nvidia agreed to expand their partnerships in physical AI, by setting up a manufacturing AI system powered by more than 50,000 Nvidia graphics processing units as well as setting up an actual AI factory.

“SK is working with Nvidia to build an AI factory specialized for SK hynix by introducing advanced digital solutions,” Chey said. “Our goal is to develop manufacturing AI that will fully automate the chip production process.”

During a meeting with reporters after the keynote, Chey said SK Group was able to make a fast transition to AI because it "already had a portfolio tailored to AI."

"From now on, each SK company will develop its own strategy on how to leverage AI in manufacturing to strengthen its competitiveness," he said.

Regarding claims of an "AI bubble" that question the circular capital flow between chipmakers, GPU suppliers and AI service providers, Chey said: "A transaction is a transaction, and calling that a bubble is going too far."

He also noted that he had to miss the casual meeting at a chicken restaurant between Huang, Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Chung Euisun, which went viral online and became an internet meme, because he was hosting the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit last week. He added that Huang understood his absence.

During the forum, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent separate video messages sharing their commitment to AI business partnerships with SK Group. In a recent meeting between Chey and Altman, OpenAI requested 900,000 HBM wafers per month for the Stargate data center project, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) has teamed up with SK Group to build a mega-sized AI data center in Ulsan.

Following Chey, SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung introduced the company’s plan to reposition itself as “full-stack AI memory creator.”

“While past memory solutions focused on integration around computing, future memory solutions will diversify and expand the role of memory itself, enabling much greater use of computing resources and structurally resolving inference bottlenecks,” Kwak said.

New SK Telecom CEO Jung Jai-hun also delivered a speech at the forum, announcing the telecom company’s initiatives to accelerate the expansion of its AI data center business, as well as plans to cooperate with SK affiliates to introduce more energy-efficient data center solutions.

The summit was attended by not only SK Group companies but also its peer companies, including AWS, Nvidia, Schneider Electric, Kakao and a number of Korean AI startups. Before his keynote, Chey toured booths of SK affiliates and participating companies, showing interest in several startups including Clify, an AI-powered mentality caring service firm, and RLWRLD (Realworld), a physical AI company developing foundation models for humanoids.

Also at the forum, Tim Costa, Nvidia’s general manager of industrial & computational engineering, quantum, gave a presentation on AI supercomputing for next-generation semiconductor design and manufacturing. Kakao CEO Chung Shin-a also delivered a presentation on the future of AI agents for sustainable personal and social development.

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved