NVIDIA just wrapped its biggest AI Day in Korea yet, drawing over 1,000 attendees to Seoul last week for a deep dive into sovereign AI development. The event highlighted Korea's rapidly expanding AI ecosystem, with 700+ local startups now part of NVIDIA's Inception program and major conglomerates like Samsung and NAVER Cloud racing to build AI-powered infrastructure. As Korea prepares to harness 260,000 GPUs through a massive infrastructure initiative announced at the recent APEC Summit, the Seoul gathering offered a glimpse into how the nation is positioning itself as an AI powerhouse.
NVIDIA just delivered its most ambitious AI Day in Korea, and the numbers tell a compelling story about the nation's AI trajectory. More than 1,000 developers, researchers, and startup founders packed into Seoul last week, representing the largest turnout yet for the chip giant's regional showcase.
The timing couldn't be more strategic. Korea is sitting on the cusp of a massive AI infrastructure expansion, with 260,000 GPUs set to power the next phase of the country's digital transformation. "In the public sector, AI is already helping process documents, policies and regulatory information at scale, enabling citizens to receive the answers they need instantly," Shilpa Kolhatkar, global head of AI nations at NVIDIA, told attendees.
But it's the private sector momentum that's really catching attention. Korea now hosts over 700 startups in NVIDIA's Inception program, with 332,000 developers actively using NVIDIA technologies - a 40% jump from last year's figures. The Korean Ministry of SMEs and Startups awarded five finalists from the Inception Grand Challenge, highlighting what officials call "the momentum of Korea's AI startup community."
Samsung Electronics principal engineer Useong Kim captured the energy perfectly: "The best part of AI Day Seoul was definitely coming to the Q&A counter to directly ask questions and communicate with NVIDIA technical experts. It's invaluable to ask what you're curious about and get immediate feedback."
The corporate partnerships unveiled at the event reveal how deep Korea's AI integration has become. NAVER Cloud is building what CTO Yong-Jae Kwak calls "technological sovereignty" through expanded collaboration with NVIDIA, spanning GPU infrastructure to AI models and agent technologies. The company demonstrated its agentic AI system development using the NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit, showing optimization insights that could reshape how Korean businesses approach automation.
