Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang high-fives Samsung’s Lee Jae-yong throughout an occasion celebrating 25 years of GeForce held in Gangnam, Seoul, on Oct. 30, 2025. (Yonhap)
Samsung, SK, Hyundai Motors and different Korean corporations are fleshing out their semiconductor utilization methods forward of the huge inflow of AI-grade graphics processing items (GPUs), demonstrating the renewed pace of the standard Korean financial mannequin led by chaebol conglomerates and their funding methods.
On Oct. 31, throughout a go to to Korea for the Asia-Pacific Financial Cooperation summit, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang introduced he can be supplying 260,000 cutting-edge chips to South Korea’s authorities and companies within the nation.
Naver has been the quickest to maneuver after securing 60,000 GPUs from Nvidia. The Korean platform’s synthetic intelligence technique, launched on Thursday, exhibits that the corporate plans to take a position over 1 trillion gained in GPU purchases in 2026 — roughly twice what it invested in 2025. In 2023 and 2024, Naver invested 130 billion gained and 230 billion gained in chips, respectively.
Naver’s newly acquired GPUs might be utilized to advance a proprietary AI mannequin the corporate is at the moment serving to develop, set up bodily AI platforms and related providers, and develop the corporate’s “Agent N” AI assistant service. Naver is set to broaden its company cloud service, which relies in its knowledge facilities in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province, and Sejong Metropolis, to the bodily AI sector, which might be finest utilized within the manufacturing trade.
Samsung and SK, two of South Korea’s reminiscence semiconductor giants, will give attention to using Nvidia chips to improve their current semiconductor factories. By dispersing over 50,000 GPUs throughout its home and worldwide chip factories and infrastructure, Samsung will replace these services into AI-based “good factories,” whereas additionally using the chips to develop its personal robotics know-how.
The SK Group will use 2,000 of the Nvidia chips it’s been allotted in SK Hynix’s new facility close to its chip cluster in Yongin, the place it’ll pursue a “digital twin” service that enables for digital simulation of manufacturing traces to enhance chip fabrication.
Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon speaks on the annual Dan25 Naver convention held in Seoul on Nov. 6, 2025. (courtesy of Naver)
The remaining 50,000 chips might be deployed to the AI knowledge middle SK has partnered with Amazon Net Companies to construct in Ulsan — Korea’s largest manufacturing hub — for industrial AI purposes.
On this sense, SK’s technique differs from Samsung’s plan to make use of the superior chips internally by as a substitute broadening utilization to exterior providers.
Hyundai Motor Group, for its half, plans to make use of its Nvidia chips to introduce digital twins for its current affiliate manufacturing traces whereas additionally creating robotic and autonomous driving capabilities. Like SK, Hyundai has additionally introduced plans to arrange a brand new home AI knowledge middle, highlighting its plans to department out from merely creating and incorporating AI tech internally.
By Park Jong-o, workers reporter
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