Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is scheduled to arrive in Seoul next Friday for pivotal discussions with the leaders of South Korea’s premier conglomerates. This visit marks his anticipated return since the high-profile “kkanbu summit” in October, which garnered significant national attention.
This upcoming visit signals a strategic shift in the collaboration agenda, moving beyond the essential memory chips powering Nvidia’s processors to focus on the advanced machines and systems these powerful processors will drive.
Industry sources confirmed on Friday that SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo, and Naver founder Lee Hae-jin are confirmed to attend meetings on June 5. Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Chung Euisun is also finalizing his schedule with a strong likelihood of participation.
However, Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong, who was a central figure at the original “kkanbu summit,” is reportedly unable to join these critical discussions due to prior overseas commitments.
Jensen Huang’s trip to Korea will immediately follow his commitments at GTC Taipei 2026, Nvidia’s annual AI conference running from June 1-4, where he is slated to deliver the opening keynote speech. His previous visit to Korea famously concluded with a casual gathering over fried chicken and beer at a Kkanbu Chicken outlet in Samsung-dong, where he, Lee Jae-yong, and Chung met without aides. The establishment’s name, “Kkanbu,” meaning ‘ally’ or ‘close friend’ and popularized by the drama “Squid Game,” quickly became shorthand for the deepening strategic alliance between Nvidia’s cutting-edge chip technology and Korea’s robust manufacturing capabilities.
The central theme for this visit is physical AI – an innovative domain that merges artificial intelligence with tangible hardware such as robots, autonomous vehicles, and advanced factory systems. The meeting between LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo and Huang will be their first, building on productive discussions held last month between LG Electronics CEO Lyu Jae-cheol and Madison Huang, Nvidia’s senior director and CEO’s daughter. These talks explored integrating LG’s CLOiD home robot with Nvidia’s sophisticated Isaac robotics software. The agenda for LG also includes discussions on a robot foundation model, envisioned as the “brain” for future humanoids, currently under development by LG AI Research.
Hyundai Motor Group is strategically positioning Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robots as a cornerstone for its future business expansion. Meanwhile, Naver, which previously solidified a physical AI platform partnership with Nvidia at last year’s Gyeongju APEC summit, aims to accelerate joint research and development centered around Nvidia’s Omniverse simulation platform. During that summit, Naver was allocated 60,000 of the 260,000 GPUs Nvidia pledged to support Korea’s AI advancements.
SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, known for his frequent interactions with Huang and scheduled to meet him again at Computex 2026 in Taiwan, will engage in further discussions on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) technologies in Seoul. This timing is particularly significant as Samsung announced on Friday the world’s first sample shipments of its seventh-generation HBM4E memory, a mere three months after initiating mass production of HBM4, underscoring Korea’s leadership in advanced memory solutions vital for AI infrastructure.
An Nvidia source indicated that the specific venue for these high-stakes meetings is still being determined.
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