[Digital Today reporter Dae-geon Seok] Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang (젠슨 황) will visit South Korea on June 5. It will be his first trip since October last year, about 7 months ago. Over four days, he is expected to meet heads of major local conglomerates, the gaming industry, AI and robotics startups and university researchers in succession.

Huang is expected to arrive at Gimpo Airport at about 1 p.m. on a chartered plane, business and IT industry sources said. He is expected to give brief remarks on arrival and take questions from reporters. He will then head straight into Seoul to begin his schedule.

Huang is expected to hold a dinner meeting on Friday evening with major South Korean business figures at a pork belly restaurant called "Hyeongnim Jeoyo" near Hongdae in Seoul. Chey Tae-won (최태원), chairman of SK Group, Chung Euisun (정의선), chairman of Hyundai Motor Group, Koo Kwang-mo (구광모), chairman of LG Group, and Lee Hae-jin (이해진), chairman of Naver, are expected to attend. The restaurant is known as a place visited by British chef Gordon Ramsay, and it was confirmed it would not take reservations on Friday afternoon. With the venue in a busy Hongdae district, some have raised the possibility that Huang could come into contact with members of the public.

Some expect the participants to pair soju with pork belly, in what is dubbed a "samso" meeting. Cooperation plans are expected to be discussed broadly, including for the AI semiconductor supply chain such as high-bandwidth memory, AI data centres, autonomous driving, robots and physical AI. During his visit in October last year, Huang met Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong (이재용) and Chung at a chicken restaurant in Seoul’s Samseong-dong area, drawing attention as a so-called "kkanbu" meeting. On June 1 during Computex in Taiwan, Huang also showed his intention to expand cooperation in AI and robotics at a dinner attended by people from Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, LG Electronics and Naver.

◆From games, startups and universities... expanding touchpoints for physical AI

Huang’s schedule after the dinner is also packed. He is expected to meet NCSoft CEO Kim Taek-jin (김택진) in Seoul on June 7. NCSoft has continued cooperation with Nvidia in gaming, including entering "Aion 2" and "Sindercity" in Nvidia’s GeForce Gamer Festival last year, and the meeting is expected to cover cooperation in games and AI.

On June 8, he is scheduled to hold a closed-door meeting at the Shilla Hotel in Seoul with heads of local AI and robotics startups. Attendees are expected to include Upstage, which has its own large language model called "Solar", as well as Nota and Vessl AI. Upstage is pushing to develop a sovereign LLM using Nvidia GPUs and the open AI model Nemotron. It is the first time Huang has met South Korean robotics startups.

Options are also being coordinated to visit Seoul National University’s AI Institute and robotics institute on the same day. Separately from those visits, Huang is reported to have expressed a desire to communicate directly with Seoul National University students. He is also considering visits on an agenda of physical AI cooperation to LG Twin Tower in Seoul’s Yeouido, Hyundai Motor Group’s headquarters in Yangjae, and Naver’s second headquarters, 1784, in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province. At LG, key affiliates including LG Electronics, LG Innotek, LG Uplus and the LG AI Research institute could attend, some say. Naver’s 1784 is seen as a space that concentrates the company’s future technologies, including robots, cloud and digital twin.

Industry sources see the visit as a move by Nvidia to expand the scope of cooperation with South Korea from AI semiconductor supply chains such as HBM to robots, automobiles, games and cloud infrastructure. As demand for AI chips spreads beyond data centres to automobiles, robots and manufacturing sites, it is interpreted as an intention to make South Korea a key partner in the physical AI ecosystem.

During the trip, Huang is scheduled to appear on tvN talk show "You Quiz on the Block" and throw the ceremonial first pitch at a Doosan Bears home game at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in Seoul. He is expected to depart in the late afternoon of June 8 or the morning of June 9 after completing all schedules.