At 7:10 p.m. on Friday, the center of gravity of the global AI supply chain moved to a pork belly restaurant in Seoul’s Mapo district. Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, arrived at Hyeongnim Jeoyo, a casual barbecue spot near Hongik University, to sit down with the chairmen of three of South Korea’s most powerful business groups: Chey Tae-won of SK, Koo Kwang-mo of LG, and Lee Hae-jin of Naver. The menu was samgyeopsal and soju, the conversation ran long, and Lee paid the bill with Naver Pay to the cheers of patrons.
The dinner was part ritual, part business. Outside the restaurant, crowds gathered as word spread that Huang was inside, and he emerged to hand out snacks, including HBM Chips, honey banana-flavored corn snacks developed jointly by convenience store chain 7-Eleven and memory maker SK hynix, along with banana milk. “Korea is doing really well. Like a PC bang, bang!, business is coming back,” he told onlookers. “My friends had a really good year. But this is just the beginning.”
The goodwill tour had a concrete deliverable. Huang announced that Nvidia has begun the process of establishing an AI technology center in South Korea, with hiring underway for AI research, engineering and robotics positions. “We are expanding AI research and engineering and Robotics research in Korea, and we are hiring talent with several partners,” he said. “If you know AI researchers or engineers, tell them to apply to Nvidia.”
The choice of Seoul is strategic, not sentimental. South Korea holds the world’s largest share of memory chip production, and its two dominant makers, SK hynix and Samsung Electronics, are the primary suppliers of the high-bandwidth memory that Nvidia’s GPUs depend on. HBM has become the bottleneck of the AI buildout, co-designed with accelerator roadmaps rather than sold as a commodity, and the companies that make it have become toll collectors on the global AI factory. Nvidia’s next platform, the Vera Rubin lineup, ramps through the second half of 2026 and depends on that memory supply being available in quantity.
The dinner also deepens a pattern of courtship. In October 2025, Huang shared fried chicken with Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai Motor Group executive chairman Chung Eui-sun at a restaurant in Seoul, an evening that market watchers noted moved Korean stocks. Friday’s gathering extended the list to the country’s other industrial pillars: LG, with its interests in automotive electronics, robotics and smart factories, and Naver, which is building its own AI platforms and cloud infrastructure.
Nvidia arrives in Seoul with an advantage the Koreans understand. The company’s revenue reached $81.6 billion in its fiscal first quarter, up 85 percent from a year earlier, with data center sales of $75.2 billion, and it guided the next quarter to about $91 billion. Every dollar of that depends on Korean factories running at full capacity, and the relationship has become mutual: Nvidia needs Korean memory and manufacturing, while Korean chipmakers need Nvidia’s design wins to justify their capacity expansion.
The geopolitical backdrop adds urgency. With export controls reshaping global chip trade and every major economy racing to secure AI supply chains, Nvidia’s presence in Seoul is as much about supply chain depth as about sales. Analysts read the visit as strategic outreach ahead of further AI infrastructure investment in the country, and noted that an on-the-ground engineering presence in Korea lets Nvidia co-develop with memory partners rather than simply buy from them.
The technology center is expected to work closely with Korean memory makers on the next generation of high-bandwidth memory, as well as with local researchers on robotics and physical AI, areas where Korean industrial groups have invested heavily. South Korea’s government has committed tens of billions of dollars to semiconductor industry support, and it has made clear it wants the country to be a hub for AI infrastructure rather than a supplier of components. Nvidia’s presence gives it a claim on that ambition.
For Nvidia, the investments are a hedge as much as an expansion. Export controls and geopolitical tensions have made every major chip company rethink where its supply chain lives, and Korea offers what few other countries can: world-class memory, advanced manufacturing and a government that wants the business. The barbecue dinner was the visible part of the courtship. The AI technology center, and the hiring that comes with it, is the part that will matter in the years ahead.
The economics of the evening were simple even if the setting was not. South Korea’s semiconductor industry was built on commodity memory, a brutal boom-and-bust business; the AI cycle has changed the terms, with HBM sold out and priced accordingly. For Huang, the barbecue dinner and the snacks were the easy part. The serious work, an AI technology center, hiring pipelines and deeper co-development with the companies that make the memory his chips cannot run without, is what the evening was actually about, and it is just beginning.
