South Korean President Jae Myung Lee and top business executives met with NVIDIA leadership in San Francisco to establish new partnerships spanning artificial intelligence infrastructure, research, and hardware deployment, NVIDIA reported.
The announcements detail expanded deals between the chipmaker and several major South Korean companies. NAVER, Brookfield, and NVIDIA are expanding NAVER's NVIDIA DSX AI factory at the GAK Sejong data center to 200 megawatts. Built on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform, the site will house roughly 100,000 GPUs, more than tripling the initial buildout announced in June.
SK Group and NVIDIA also unveiled plans for a $500-billion-plus comprehensive partnership to build compute infrastructure. The expanded deployment relies on NVIDIA Vera Rubin infrastructure powered by SK hynix HBM4 memory chips. Hyundai Motor Group outlined a physical AI strategy centered on a robot reference platform developed with NVIDIA, supported by an expansion using 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. Hyundai is also integrating NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion and DRIVE AGX running on DriveOS into its vehicle platforms.
Academic and research initiatives
Academic institutions in South Korea established new joint ventures alongside the corporate deals, according to NVIDIA. 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. Focused on agentic AI tailored for the Korean language and local industry, the lab marks the first joint AI research facility between a Korean university and a global technology company.
NVIDIA and KAIST’s Department of Mechanical Engineering are planning an NVIDIA AI Technology Center (NVAITC) to study physical AI using NVIDIA Nemotron open models. NVIDIA and Seoul National University are planning a separate NVAITC covering foundation models, physical AI, accelerated computing, and AI for science using both Nemotron and NVIDIA Cosmos open world models.
Summit events and executive meetings
The announcements coincided with a series of meetings involving global technology executives. At the Midway venue in San Francisco, Stanford University’s Soh Kim moderated a session featuring President Lee, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. South Korean business leaders in attendance included Samsung Electronics Chairman Jay Y. Lee, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung, and NAVER founder Hae-jin Lee.
Ahead of the main summit, President Lee met individually with Huang at the Fairmont San Francisco on Friday, July 24. Korean executives also toured NVIDIA’s Santa Clara headquarters Endeavor building, following a dinner held in Woodside, California on Thursday, July 23, with SK Group and NVIDIA leadership teams.
