President Lee Jae Myung meets with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the APEC summit venue, the HICO Convention Center in Gyeongju, on October 31. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, Oct. 31 (Korea Bizwire) — Nvidia Corp. said on Friday that it plans to deploy up to 260,000 of its latest graphics processing units, or GPUs, across South Korea in partnership with the government and several of the country’s largest conglomerates — a sweeping initiative aimed at turning the nation into one of the world’s major hubs for artificial intelligence computing.
The plan, unveiled ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Gyeongju, involves close cooperation between the U.S. chipmaker and a coalition of South Korean partners, including Samsung Electronics, SK Group, Hyundai Motor Group, and Naver Cloud. Each company will establish its own AI data center powered by Nvidia’s new Blackwell GPUs, the most advanced processors in the company’s lineup.
The Seoul government will also participate, allocating roughly 50,000 GPUs to help create a national “sovereign AI” platform designed to train large language models optimized for Korean language and industrial use. Samsung, SK, and Hyundai will each deploy a similar number, while Naver Cloud will install about 60,000 units, bringing the total to 260,000.
The expansion would raise South Korea’s total installed AI GPU capacity from roughly 65,000 to more than 300,000 units — a fivefold increase that would make the country one of the largest AI computing centers outside the United States, Nvidia said.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and chief executive, arrived in Seoul on Thursday and met with Hyundai Motor’s executive chair, Euisun Chung, and Samsung Electronics chairman, Lee Jae-yong. Huang, who was invited to Korea by President Lee Jae Myung, is expected to announce further details of the initiative during the APEC CEO Summit later on Friday. Financial terms of the partnerships were not disclosed.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shares chicken and beer with Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Eui-sun at a restaurant in Seoul’s Samseong-dong on October 30. (Yonhap)
According to participating companies, the project will span several industries. Samsung plans to use the AI infrastructure to modernize semiconductor manufacturing through digital twin simulations and robotics. SK Group will apply it to semiconductor research and cloud-based AI services, while its telecom arm, SK Telecom, will operate sovereign industrial cloud services powered by Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition.
Hyundai Motor said it will deploy 50,000 Blackwell GPUs to train large AI models for autonomous driving, robotics, and smart factory systems, while co-investing about $3 billion with the government to establish a “physical AI” ecosystem. Naver Cloud will use its share of GPUs to underpin large-scale domestic AI foundation models.
LG Group is also collaborating with Nvidia on AI-powered robotics and medical technology, including a research initiative for AI-based cancer diagnostics using LG AI Research’s large-scale model EXAONE.
Nvidia said it will further work with Samsung, SK Telecom, KT, LG Uplus, and Yonsei University to develop AI-native 6G radio access networks — the next frontier in global telecommunications.
Kevin Lee (kevinlee@koreabizwire.com)
