At AI Summit, South Korea Outlines Its AI Future With NVIDIA and Partners

At the AI Summit in San Francisco this week, South Korean President Jae Myung Lee and leading business figures joined NVIDIA and partners to outline Korea's AI future. Following Jensen Huang's visit to South Korea last month, discussions focused on expanding the nation's AI infrastructure and expertise on the path to becoming a global AI innovation center.

NVIDIA and KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) announced the establishment of a joint AI research lab at KAIST's Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI in Seoul, aiming to advance agentic AI for South Korea. This marks the first joint AI lab between a Korean university and a global technology company, bringing together NVIDIA's full-stack AI expertise with KAIST's scientific talent.

NVIDIA and Korea's ecosystem partners, including NAVER, SK Telecom, Hyundai Motor Group, KAIST, and Seoul National University (SNU), pledged to develop national AI factories, physical AI platforms, and collaborate on research in agentic AI. NAVER, Brookfield, and NVIDIA pledged to expand NAVER's NVIDIA DSX AI factory at its GAK Sejong data center to 200 megawatts, more than tripling the initial buildout of 100,000 GPUs on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform.

SK Group and NVIDIA also announced a $500-billion-plus partnership to establish AI infrastructure, expanding initial plans to deploy NVIDIA Vera Rubin infrastructure powered by SK hynix HBM4 memory. Hyundai Motor Group outlined a physical AI strategy, including a robot reference platform developed with NVIDIA and 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs.

NVIDIA also plans to collaborate with KAIST and Seoul National University on NVIDIA AI Technology Centers, focusing on physical AI, talent development, and knowledge exchange in various AI domains. President Lee and Huang met to discuss deepening the partnership behind Korea's national AI ambitions, with Lee expressing his hope to only begin the beginning of Korea's golden age in AI.