South Korea is positioning itself as a pivotal hub in the global AI supply chain through major partnerships with NVIDIA

At this week's AI Summit in San Francisco, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and the nation's top business leaders and researchers met with NVIDIA and ecosystem partners to advance Korea's full-stack push toward becoming a global center for AI innovation. NVIDIA and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology announced a joint AI research lab at KAIST's Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI in Seoul, the first joint AI lab between a Korean university and any global technology company. The collaboration brings together NVIDIA's full-stack AI expertise, NVIDIA Nemotron open models and NVIDIA AI Cloud partner computing with KAIST's scientific talent.

Core to the announcements, NAVER, Brookfield and NVIDIA will expand NAVER's 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 global compute demand, deploying 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 collaboration with 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and integrating NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion autonomous vehicle development platform with HMG's vehicle platforms.

Additional research collaborations include an NVIDIA AI Technology Center at KAIST's Department of Mechanical Engineering for physical AI research and another at Seoul National University spanning foundation models, accelerated computing, physical AI and AI for science. President Lee met with Jensen Huang Friday at the Fairmont San Francisco to discuss deepening the partnership. Huang noted that NVIDIA and Korea have been partners for over 25 years and committed to deepening that partnership across AI infrastructure, semiconductors, physical AI and research. At the Midway venue stage discussion, President Lee presented Korea's vision to become one of the key engines of the global AI revolution, framing a multitrillion dollar push into AI semiconductors, hyperscale data centers and physical AI. The stage brought together NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Broadcom's Hock Tan, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and South Korea's industrial leaders including Samsung's Jay Y. Lee, SK Group's Chey Tae-won, Hyundai's Euisun Chung and NAVER's Hae-jin Lee.