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Chips NVIDIA, SK Group announce $500B AI partnership; SK Telecom builds 2-gigawatt AI factory in South Korea Breaking AI root-cause analysis shifts from agent reasoning to deterministic context engineering Funding Meshy closes $400M Series B for AI-generated 3D at $1.5B valuation; 12M users, 100M models Funding Sila raises $300M to scale silicon-anode battery production; Moses Lake plant targets 100K+ EV capacity Policy White House accuses Moonshot of distilling Anthropic's Fable for Kimi K3; tech leaders defend open distillation Funding General Compute closes $400M debt on inference chips; first deal with SambaNova ASICs as collateral Market Big Tech's hidden AI debt hits $1.65T; off-balance-sheet commitments dwarf reported figures Research Black Forest Labs FLUX 3: Multimodal Video + Audio + Action in One Model; Beats Seedance, Runway Research Anthropic ships Claude Opus 5 at $5/$25 per Mtok—near-Fable-5 coding at half Fable's price Policy Jensen Huang debuts on X with open-weight AI letter, backing models against Washington restriction Chips Intel Foundry Q2: $5.8B revenue, external customer mix still 5% of total Chips Samsung locks $200B with Broadcom: HBM4 + 2nm foundry through 2030 for AI chips Breaking Moonshot AI halts Kimi K3 subscriptions as demand hits infrastructure limits amid U.S. chip export curbs Funding Paper raises $34M Series A from Accel, ICONIQ for AI-native design platform Research Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5: matches Fable on benchmarks, 50% cheaper, praised for coding Funding Cathedral: DOGE alumni raise $160M for stealth AI military cybersecurity startup at $1.4B valuation Market NVIDIA locks down SK Hynix HBM supply with $500B AI infrastructure deal Research Poolside releases Laguna S 2.1, 118B open-weight model beating DeepSeek V4 Flash on agentic tasks Funding Etched raises $300M Series C at $10.3B valuation, values inference chips above general training Market SpaceX Starship Flight 13 deploys 20 Starlink V3 satellites post-IPO, stock down 43% from peak Chips NVIDIA, SK Group announce $500B AI partnership; SK Telecom builds 2-gigawatt AI factory in South Korea Breaking AI root-cause analysis shifts from agent reasoning to deterministic context engineering Funding Meshy closes $400M Series B for AI-generated 3D at $1.5B valuation; 12M users, 100M models Funding Sila raises $300M to scale silicon-anode battery production; Moses Lake plant targets 100K+ EV capacity Policy White House accuses Moonshot of distilling Anthropic's Fable for Kimi K3; tech leaders defend open distillation Funding General Compute closes $400M debt on inference chips; first deal with SambaNova ASICs as collateral Market Big Tech's hidden AI debt hits $1.65T; off-balance-sheet commitments dwarf reported figures Research Black Forest Labs FLUX 3: Multimodal Video + Audio + Action in One Model; Beats Seedance, Runway Research Anthropic ships Claude Opus 5 at $5/$25 per Mtok—near-Fable-5 coding at half Fable's price Policy Jensen Huang debuts on X with open-weight AI letter, backing models against Washington restriction Chips Intel Foundry Q2: $5.8B revenue, external customer mix still 5% of total Chips Samsung locks $200B with Broadcom: HBM4 + 2nm foundry through 2030 for AI chips Breaking Moonshot AI halts Kimi K3 subscriptions as demand hits infrastructure limits amid U.S. chip export curbs Funding Paper raises $34M Series A from Accel, ICONIQ for AI-native design platform Research Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5: matches Fable on benchmarks, 50% cheaper, praised for coding Funding Cathedral: DOGE alumni raise $160M for stealth AI military cybersecurity startup at $1.4B valuation Market NVIDIA locks down SK Hynix HBM supply with $500B AI infrastructure deal Research Poolside releases Laguna S 2.1, 118B open-weight model beating DeepSeek V4 Flash on agentic tasks Funding Etched raises $300M Series C at $10.3B valuation, values inference chips above general training Market SpaceX Starship Flight 13 deploys 20 Starlink V3 satellites post-IPO, stock down 43% from peak
Chips

NVIDIA, SK Group announce $500B AI partnership; SK Telecom builds 2-gigawatt AI factory in South Korea

NVIDIA and SK Group signed letters of intent for a $500-billion-plus comprehensive partnership announced July 24 to establish AI infrastructure and next-generation memory. SK Telecom plans to build a 2-gigawatt AI factory in South Korea using NVIDIA's DSX platform and Vera Rubin accelerated computing powered by SK hynix HBM4 memory, with the first facility coming online in 2027.

The deal bundles AI infrastructure construction, GPU purchases, long-term memory supply from SK hynix, and ecosystem partner revenue into the aggregate valuation. It aims to support sovereign AI, enterprise AI, physical AI, and agentic AI deployments across South Korea and the Asia-Pacific region. A 200-megawatt expansion of NAVER's existing DSX AI factory in Sejong will bring it to roughly 100,000 GPUs on the Vera Rubin platform.

For architects: This locks in years of SK hynix HBM supply to NVIDIA and positions South Korean capacity as a globally significant compute hub. The 2027 timeline means Vera Rubin at scale will drive cost and efficiency benchmarks for the region. Monitor SK Telecom's real capacity metrics against pledged 2 GW—slippage or delay in 2027 rollout would ripple through Asia-Pacific infrastructure pricing.

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