South Korea is accelerating its ambition to become a global center for artificial intelligence innovation by forging strategic partnerships with NVIDIA and domestic industry leaders. The initiative took center stage this week at the AI Summit in San Francisco, where South Korean President Jae Myung Lee met with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang alongside top Korean executives and researchers. These high-level discussions build upon Huang’s recent visit to South Korea and outline a coordinated, full-stack strategy to expand the nation’s AI infrastructure, academic research, and industry ecosystem. A flagship development announced at the summit is a joint AI research laboratory established by NVIDIA and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Located at KAIST’s Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI in Seoul, the facility represents the first collaboration of its kind between a South Korean university and a global technology corporation. The lab will leverage KAIST’s premier scientific talent alongside NVIDIA’s full-stack AI capabilities, including the Nemotron open models and AI Cloud partner computing, to drive advanced research in agentic AI. Complementing academic advancement, South Korea is simultaneously reinforcing its hardware and infrastructure capabilities through deepened industrial partnerships. On the eve of the summit, Jensen Huang and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won convened in Woodside, California, to advance a longstanding alliance that was expanded in June. The partnership will focus on co-developing next-generation memory solutions tailored for NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure, personal AI applications, and physical AI platforms. This hardware collaboration aligns with SK Telecom’s concurrent plans to deploy dedicated AI infrastructure supporting robotics and physical AI development across South Korea. Collectively, these moves reflect a unified national strategy to integrate university research, semiconductor innovation, and large-scale infrastructure deployment. By aligning domestic conglomerates and academic institutions with leading global technology firms, South Korea aims to solidify its competitive position in the global AI landscape while fostering sustainable, end-to-end technological advancement. The summit’s ongoing engagements are expected to yield further implementation roadmaps as industry and government officials finalize near-term deployment targets.