South Korea used this week's AI Summit in San Francisco to lay out its national artificial intelligence ambitions, with the country's leadership meeting Nvidia and a group of ecosystem partners.
According to Nvidia's blog, South Korean President Jae Myung Lee joined some of the country's top business leaders and researchers to meet with Nvidia and its partners to chart Korea's AI progress. Nvidia says the gathering builds on a visit that founder and CEO Jensen Huang made to Korea last month.
The push extended beyond Nvidia. According to StratNews Global, President Lee courted Nvidia, OpenAI and Samsung as part of the country's broader AI drive — a lineup that spans chipmaking, frontier AI models and Korea's own industrial giants.
The diplomacy also had a personal touch. The Korea Herald described an "AI power dinner" hosted by Lee, held over fish and chips, underscoring how closely Korea's government is working to build relationships with the leading players shaping the technology.
Taken together, the sources point to a coordinated effort by Seoul to position South Korea as a serious contender in the global AI race, aligning its government, its largest companies and its researchers with the firms that supply the world's most sought-after AI hardware and software.
Why it matters: as nations compete for AI capacity and the chips that power it, South Korea's summit outreach signals it intends to be a builder and partner in that ecosystem rather than a bystander.