Jensen Huang’s Asia swing wrapped up Monday with what he himself, in Korean trade press, reportedly described as a “honeymoon.” It is hard to argue with the framing. NVIDIA’s CEO arrived in Seoul on June 5 directly after Computex, met with Hyundai, LG, SK, Samsung, and Naver across a long working weekend, and left with six announced or signed partnerships covering memory, AI cloud infrastructure, automotive, robotics, and a national AI R&D center.
The list, in rough order of capital intensity. SK Hynix on a multi-year memory partnership for global AI data centers, which is the part that moves stock prices. SK Telecom on a gigawatt-class AI cloud built on NVIDIA’s DSX system, with the first data center scheduled to come online in 2027, which is the part that moves the geography of frontier-AI training. Naver on an end-to-end “AI factory” on the same DSX platform. LG on an AI factory specifically dedicated to robotics and self-driving. Hyundai and the Korean government in late-stage talks on a national AI R&D center to be located in Seoul. And Doosan, for reasons that no press release fully explained, on robotics plus Blackwell chip materials.
The shape of what just happened is the part worth zooming in on. Korea spent the last decade being a memory supplier to NVIDIA. Samsung and SK Hynix manufacture the HBM3e and HBM4 stacks that make a Blackwell GPU actually go. As of this week, Korea is also a downstream NVIDIA customer (SKT, Naver), an automotive OEM partner (Hyundai, LG), a robotics partner (LG, Doosan), and the host country for a Seoul-based NVIDIA R&D facility. The supplier-to-customer flip happened inside of five business days.
Whether NVIDIA is consciously cultivating Korea as a counterweight to Taiwan, hedging the TSMC dependency, or just visibly closing the lap as the only company in the world that can have this many of these conversations simultaneously at this scale, the trip closed with Huang reportedly saying “I brought hundreds of billions in gifts.” That is the kind of line a CEO says when the trip went better than the trip was supposed to go. The next thing to watch is what Samsung specifically signed, which the official wrap-ups have been conspicuously light on details about.