SK hynix teams up with Naver Cloud for AI products

Naver Cloud CEO Kim Yu-won, left, and SK hynix Chief Development Officer Ahn Hyun pose with a memorandum of understanding on next-generation artificial intelligence products during a ceremony at an undisclosed location, Tuesday. Courtesy of SK hynix

SK hynix and Naver Cloud have formed a partnership to foster each other’s artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, running optimization processes using the former’s chips and the latter’s cloud infrastructure, the two companies said Wednesday.

SK hynix Chief Development Officer Ahn Hyun and Naver Cloud CEO Kim Yu-won signed a memorandum of understanding on the two companies’ technological cooperation for AI products during a ceremony held Tuesday.

Under the partnership, SK hynix will evaluate and optimize next-generation AI memory and storage products in Naver Cloud’s real AI service environments.

SK hynix plans to validate its AI-specialized products using Compute Express Link and Processing-In-Memory technologies in real time under diverse workload conditions at Naver Cloud’s large-scale data center infrastructure.

Naver Cloud will optimize its data center software by using SK hynix’s latest hardware so that it can improve the use efficiency of its graphics processing units, shorten the response speed of AI services and reduce costs.

The partnership comes amid the exponential growth of data usage and costs in AI inference processes, requiring AI service providers to pursue not only memory bandwidth and capacity but also optimization between hardware and software.

“The competitiveness of AI services is determined by the optimization across the entire data center infrastructure,” Kim said. “By partnering with a leading global AI memory semiconductor firm, we will strengthen competitiveness from infrastructure to services and deliver more innovative AI experiences to customers.”

“SK hynix will thoroughly validate its products in commercial environments and provide top-tier memory solutions required by the global AI ecosystem,” Ahn said. “Starting with this partnership, we will also actively expand technological collaborations with global cloud service providers.”