South Korean President Jae Myung Lee, senior business leaders and researchers from the country are meeting with NVIDIA and its ecosystem partners at this week’s AI Summit in San Francisco to discuss South Korea’s AI development agenda.

The meetings follow NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s visit to Korea last month. According to NVIDIA, the discussions and announcements at the summit are intended to advance South Korea’s full-stack effort to expand national AI infrastructure and expertise as the country works toward becoming a global center for AI innovation. In this context, “full-stack” refers to efforts spanning computing infrastructure, AI models, research talent and industry deployment rather than a single layer of the AI supply chain.

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. The lab will focus on advancing agentic AI for South Korea. Agentic AI generally refers to systems designed to plan, reason and take actions across tasks with varying degrees of autonomy, an area that has become a major focus for AI research and enterprise software development. NVIDIA said it is the first joint AI lab between a Korean university and any global technology company.

The collaboration is designed to establish an academic AI research program combining NVIDIA’s full-stack AI expertise, NVIDIA Nemotron open models and computing from NVIDIA AI Cloud partners with research talent from KAIST, which NVIDIA described as one of Asia’s leading research universities. NVIDIA’s announcement on the KAIST lab is available at NVIDIA Newsroom, and information on NVIDIA Nemotron is available at NVIDIA.

NVIDIA said additional updates are expected as the summit continues, including Huang’s meetings with President Lee and with business leaders from Korea and the United States.

Thursday, July 23, 9 p.m. PT: NVIDIA and SK Mark Longstanding Collaboration

On the eve of the summit, Huang, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, and teams from SK hynix, SK Telecom and NVIDIA gathered for dinner in Woodside, California. NVIDIA described the event as a Silicon Valley welcome for the Korean business leaders.

NVIDIA and SK, which have maintained a longstanding partnership, announced in June an expanded collaboration to codevelop memory for NVIDIA platforms across AI infrastructure, personal AI and physical AI. Memory is a key component of AI infrastructure because large-scale training and inference systems require high-bandwidth data movement between processors and memory. NVIDIA’s announcement on the SK hynix collaboration is available at NVIDIA Newsroom.

Also in June, SK Telecom announced plans to build AI infrastructure to support Korea’s work in physical AI, robotics and other areas. More information on NVIDIA’s work with Korea ecosystem partners is available at NVIDIA Blog.