South Korea is committing to become a global center for AI innovation through major partnerships with NVIDIA, including

At this week's AI Summit in San Francisco, South Korean President Jae Myung Lee and the country's top business leaders and researchers are meeting with NVIDIA and ecosystem partners to advance Korea's AI infrastructure and expertise. Building on NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang's visit to Korea last month, the discussions and announcements advance the nation's full-stack push toward becoming a global center for AI innovation.

NVIDIA and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced a joint AI research lab at the KAIST Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI in Seoul, dedicated to advancing agentic AI for South Korea. This is the first joint AI lab between a Korean university and any global technology company. The collaboration will combine NVIDIA full-stack AI expertise, NVIDIA Nemotron open models and NVIDIA AI Cloud partner computing with the scientific talent at KAIST, one of Asia's premier research universities.

NVIDIA and its Korea ecosystem partners — including NAVER, SK Telecom, Hyundai Motor Group, KAIST and Seoul National University — are committing to develop national AI factories and physical AI platforms as well as advancing joint research in agentic AI.

At the core of these efforts, NAVER, Brookfield and NVIDIA will expand NAVER's NVIDIA DSX AI factory at its GAK Sejong data center to 200 megawatts, roughly 100,000 GPUs built on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform, more than tripling the initial buildout announced in June. SK Group and NVIDIA announced plans for a $500-billion-plus comprehensive partnership to establish AI infrastructure serving the surging demand for global compute. The expanded collaboration will deploy NVIDIA Vera Rubin infrastructure powered by SK hynix HBM4 memory.

Hyundai Motor Group outlined a physical AI strategy anchored by a robot reference platform developed with NVIDIA, extending a buildout with 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. The collaboration also includes the integration of NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion, an autonomous vehicle development platform, with Hyundai Motor Group's vehicle platforms.

NVIDIA and KAIST's Department of Mechanical Engineering are planning an NVIDIA AI Technology Center for collaborative research, talent development and knowledge exchange in physical AI. NVIDIA and Seoul National University are also planning an NVAITC covering AI research, talent development and education spanning foundation models, accelerated computing, physical AI and AI for science.

President Lee met with Huang at the Fairmont San Francisco ahead of the AI Summit. President Lee noted he had seen reports of Huang eating beer and fried chicken in Seoul and hoped to join. Huang responded that the enthusiasm he felt across Korea was incredible, saying "Everyone in Korea loves AI." Huang noted that NVIDIA and Korea have been partners for over 25 years, from PC gaming to the AI revolution, and committed to deepening that partnership. He told the President, "From AI chips and physical AI to AI infrastructure, Korea has achieved remarkable results under your leadership over the past year. This is truly the beginning of a golden age for Korea." President Lee responded, "I hope this is only the beginning."

At the summit itself, President Lee laid out a bold vision for South Korea not merely to participate in the AI revolution but to be one of its key engines. The gathering brought together an eye-popping lineup of global tech leaders including NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Broadcom's Hock Tan and Anthropic's Dario Amodei, alongside South Korea's industrial vanguard including Samsung Electronics Chairman Jay Y. Lee, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung and NAVER founder Lee Hae-jin.

President Lee opened with a "San Francisco AI Declaration," drawing a line from the city's rebirth after the 1906 earthquake to Korea's post-war rise into an IT powerhouse. He pitched a multitrillion-dollar push into AI semiconductors, hyperscale data centers and physical AI, comparing the emergence of artificial intelligence to "humanity discovering fire anew."

Huang matched the moment by looking back over the 25-year partnership from seeding Korea's gaming culture to the memory chips that make modern AI run. He noted, "If not for the invention of HBM memory in Korea, NVIDIA wouldn't have been able to invent the supercomputers that power AI today. This really is the golden age for Korea."

SK Group's Chey Tae-won described the demand at this scale, saying that every time he has dinner with Huang, Huang tells him "more chips" and predicting that whatever number was quoted that day, Huang would ask for more the next time they met.

Sam Altman stated directly, "There really would not have been what we have, this incredible AI revolution, without Korea." Dario Amodei said Korea plays a role "throughout the stack, from semiconductors to infrastructure to an incredible concentration of talent."