The useful question is what changes for users, developers or buyers, and whether the announcement stays industry context or becomes something people can actually use.

At the AI Summit in San Francisco, South Korean President Jae Myung Lee and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang outlined plans to position South Korea as a global AI hub, emphasizing infrastructure, education, and industrial integration. The collaboration includes a joint AI research lab at KAIST dedicated to agentic AI, leveraging NVIDIA’s full-stack AI tools and Nemotron models alongside KAIST’s research talent.

NVIDIA and its partners—NAVER, SK Telecom, Hyundai Motor Group, KAIST, and Seoul National University—committed to developing national AI factories and physical AI platforms. NAVER, Brookfield, and NVIDIA will expand NAVER’s NVIDIA DSX AI factory at its GAK Sejong data center to 200 megawatts, tripling its initial capacity with NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform and roughly 100,000 GPUs.

SK Group and NVIDIA announced a $500-billion-plus partnership to establish AI infrastructure, deploying NVIDIA Vera Rubin systems powered by SK hynix HBM4 memory. Hyundai Motor Group outlined a physical AI strategy using a robot reference platform with NVIDIA, integrating 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion for autonomous vehicle development.

NVIDIA and KAIST will also launch an NVIDIA AI Technology Center (NVAITC) for collaborative research in physical AI, while Seoul National University plans a similar center covering foundation models, accelerated computing, and AI for science. President Lee and Huang reaffirmed a 25-year partnership, with Lee emphasizing Korea’s ambition to lead the global AI supply chain.