Microsoft is looking to reduce its reliance on NVIDIA in its AI infrastructure by pivoting to new partners such as SK hynix. This detail has been inferred by industry sources talking to the Korea Herald, which was able to reveal that SK hynix’s CEO Kwak Noh-Jung is meeting Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella this week during Microsoft’s closed-door CEO Summit 2026.
The invite-only summit is on now, running from Tuesday to Thursday at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It will bring together around a 100 executives and policymakers from around the world who can have frank and private discussions about hot topic issues such as generative AI, cloud infrastructure, and AI data centers. The SK hynix CEO is also expected to attend a formal dinner at Bill Gates’ private residence.
According to the Korea Herald, the repeat invite for Kwak Noh-Jung (he attended in 2024) shows that SK hynix is deeply embedded within Microsoft’s custom-silicon strategy. Earlier this year, SK hynix was named as the sole supplier of the Maia 200, Microsoft’s first in-house AI inference accelerator that it has deployed at its Des Moines, Iowa data center. It offers 30% better performance per dollar than Microsoft’s previous-generation hardware.
The Maia 200 accelerator chip has six 12-layer 36GB stacks for 216GBs of total capacity at 7 terabytes per second of bandwidth. This is the type of hardware that you need to keep big AI models running without them stalling. Aside from the Maia 200, SK hynix also supplies Microsoft with DRAM and NAND flash and it is working with Microsoft’s competitors too, providing high-bandwidth memory for NVIDIA’s GPUs and is building partnerships with Google and AWS.
The Korea Herald noted that LG Uplus CEO Hong Beom-sik is the only other South Korean telecom or ICT executive attending the summit.
0 Comments
Load the comments and join the conversation!
Read the comments, ask the editors questions, show respect and join the conversation.