Nvidia has struck a series of deals with South Korea’s tech leaders that will result in more than 250,000 of its chips deployed across that country. Included in the frenzy of activity are Samsung Electronics, which is teaming with Nvidia to build an AI “megafactory” that will use more than 50,000 Nvidia GPUs for an intelligent manufacturing facility that will produce state-of-the-art processors that will be used in mobile devices, and robotics, among other things. Nvidia also has South Korean AI factories in the works with Hyundai and manufacturing conglomerate SK Group. The announcements were made as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings.

In South Korea, Nvidia isn’t talking about building the traditional AI data centers the company has come to reference as “AI factories.” In the case of Samsung, “it’s building an AI-enabled semiconductor manufacturing plant that will embed automation into almost every stage of its chip manufacturing operations, including design, equipment, operations and quality control,” reports SiliconANGLE.

Samsung is planning “a ‘single intelligent network,’ where AI will continuously monitor and analyze its production environments, make predictions, inform maintenance and optimize everything to try and boost its chipmaking yields.”

Samsung and Nvidia are leveraging a 25-year relationship in this new enterprise, which will draw on the U.S. AI innovator’s complete toolkit — from accelerating its chipmaking OPC lithography platform with Nvidia CUDA libraries in chip manufacturing (which Nvidia says achieves 20x performance) to using Nvidia Omniverse for digital twins that “shorten time from design to operations and enable AI-driven predictive maintenance, operational optimization and real-time decision-making,” according to the Nvidia news post.

The companies “are also working together on HBM4,” high-bandwidth memory module for AI and HPC systems, a Samsung press release says.

Closer to home, Nvidia also announced that companies including Siemens, FANUC, Belden, Caterpillar, Foxconn, Lucid Motors, Toyota and TSMC are using Omniverse for digital twinning and “physical AI” to build state-of-the-art factories and “autonomous collaborative robots” to help overcome labor shortages and drive American reindustrialization.

“AI is transforming the world’s factories into intelligent thinking machines — the engines of a new industrial revolution,” Huang said in a U.S. manufacturing statement.

“Nvidia is betting on an AI-driven robot workforce to shape the future of the [U.S.],” Gizmodo reports. “Nvidia’s Vice President of Omniverse and Simulation Technology Rev Lebaredian thinks robots could account for over half a million open manufacturing jobs.”