Nvidia CEO warns memory shortage will last 'quite a few years'

Jensen Huang sealed the deal over fried chicken and beer. The Nvidia CEO was at Seoul restaurant Kkanbu Chicken on Sunday evening with SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won and SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung, and by Monday morning, the two companies plan to tell the world what they agreed on.

SK Hynix confirmed that Chey and Huang will brief media together on Monday morning, following a report by South Korean outlet Newsis. Huang teased the news to reporters without giving specifics stating, "We're working across many industries from AI supercomputers to CPUs to new PCs and robotics. So we are here to plan, and maybe tomorrow we have some announcements."

The broad scope he sketched supercomputers, CPUs, new PC formats, and robotics suggests the cooperation agreement may span multiple product lines rather than a single supply deal. Further details are expected when the two executives speak jointly on Monday.

Huang's more immediately consequential comment may not have been about SK at all. Asked about the state of the global memory market, he offered no reassurance to an industry already stretched thin by AI demand.

"The whole industry supply chain, everything from wafers to packaging to silicon photonics, everything's in short supply because the demand is so high," he said. "

It is going to persist for several years. "The warning covers the full stack: not just finished memory chips but also the raw materials, manufacturing processes, and interconnect technologies that feed into them.

The dinner at Kkanbu Chicken was not Huang's first high-profile chimaek meeting in Seoul. He held a similar gathering with Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor executives at the same restaurant during his October visit, which generated significant media coverage and became a shorthand for how Huang conducts diplomacy in South Korea informally, over food, and with outcomes that tend to follow quickly.