Nvidia's Huang courts South Korea's tech elite as AI stakes rise

Jensen Huang is turning his South Korea trip into a full-spectrum courtship of the country’s tech elite, blending meetings with chip and robotics executives with a television appearance and a ceremonial first pitch in Seoul. The Nvidia chief’s second visit in seven months underscores how central South Korea has become to the fight over AI hardware, where memory supply, advanced packaging and industrial alliances now shape who can build at scale.

The stakes are unusually high for Nvidia. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together make about 70 percent of the memory needed for AI chips like Nvidia’s, giving South Korea’s semiconductor base outsized leverage in the global AI boom. Nvidia said in October 2025 that South Korean government agencies and major companies would add more than 260,000 Nvidia GPUs for physical and agentic AI, including up to 50,000 for the national AI computing center and cloud providers, with other allocations for Samsung, SK Group, Hyundai Motor and Naver Cloud. That kind of commitment makes Huang’s return less like a courtesy call than a bid to lock in a decisive supply-chain partner.

Huang’s public schedule reflects that strategy. He is expected to appear on tvN’s You Quiz on the Block with host Yoo Jae-suk, his first appearance on a Korean variety show, and he is also planning a ceremonial first pitch at a Doosan Bears home game at Jamsil Baseball Stadium on June 7. The optics matter. In a country where business relationships are often reinforced through visible social gestures, Huang’s media and sports stops project familiarity while he deepens ties with executives who control memory, cloud capacity and manufacturing depth.

This is not a first encounter. Huang visited South Korea in October 2025 for the APEC CEO Summit in Gyeongju, where he met Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung at a widely noted chimaek gathering in Seoul. That earlier visit helped lay the groundwork for the current round of outreach, and it came before the recent GPU commitment, which has already made the relationship more concrete. SK Hynix has since sold out chip production and increased investment expectations as AI demand keeps memory tight.

The political backdrop is just as important. President Lee Jae Myung has made AI investment a top policy priority, and South Korea launched a National Artificial Intelligence Strategy Committee in 2025 to coordinate the push toward becoming one of the world’s top three AI powers. For Huang, that means South Korea is not simply another customer market. It is a strategic partner in the race to secure memory, manufacturing and geopolitical advantage in the next phase of AI deployment.