At the APEC Summit in Gyeongju, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced a sweeping initiative to build South Korea’s sovereign artificial intelligence ecosystem and infrastructure. The program envisions more than a quarter-million NVIDIA GPUs deployed across sovereign clouds, industrial AI factories and research centers, and it is backed by a coalition that includes the Ministry of Science and ICT, Samsung Electronics, SK Group, Hyundai Motor Group, NAVER Cloud and LG.
The government-led sovereign artificial intelligence program will place as many as 50,000 of the latest NVIDIA GPUs through cloud providers NHN Cloud, Kakao Corp. and NAVER Cloud, with an initial wave of 13,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. Large private investments will form the backbone of Korea’s industrial transformation: Samsung, SK Group and Hyundai Motor Group plan AI factories with up to 50,000 GPUs apiece, NAVER intends to add more than 60,000 GPUs, and SK Group is designing an AI cloud and factory environments including RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell server edition GPUs.
Technical and research collaborations are a central part of the initiative. MSIT is leading a Sovereign AI Foundation Models project with LG AI Research, NAVER Cloud, NC AI, SK Telecom, Upstage and NVIDIA using NVIDIA NeMo and Nemotron datasets to build Korean language models with reasoning and speech capabilities. NVIDIA and LG will support academic and startup work with EXAONE models, including the EXAONE Path healthcare model built with the MONAI framework for cancer diagnosis. KISTI will partner with NVIDIA to create a Center of Excellence for quantum computing and scientific research using the HANGANG supercomputer and CUDA-Q to explore hybrid quantum computing and physics-informed models.
The program also addresses networks, startups and workforce training. NVIDIA and Korean partners including Samsung and SK Telecom will develop AI-RAN and 6G technologies to offload GPU computation to base stations and reduce device energy use. NVIDIA is expanding its Inception startup program with a new alliance and a Center of Excellence powered by RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, while the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute will provide upskilling programs. The announcement follows NVIDIA’s continued engagement in Korea, including celebrations for 25 years of GeForce and a GeForce Gamer Festival highlighting DLSS 4, game demos and esports events.
