Nvidia’s chief executive arrived on a four-day trip focused on robotics and physical artificial intelligence and previewed the memory chips that have already tied the company to Korea.
Jensen Huang took the field before leaving the airport. The CEO of Nvidia, who arrived in Gimpo for a four-day visit to Seoul, told reporters that “Robotics will be the next major sector in Korea” framing the country’s manufacturing depth as a reason for being well positioned to lead Automation driven by artificial intelligence.
The line set the theme for a trip designed to expand Nvidia’s relationship with Korea beyond the memory chips it already depends on.
The trip was as much performance as business. Huang’s schedule has mixed executive meetings with a TV talk show and baseball appearances, a charm offensive in a country that supplies high-bandwidth memory that can’t be shipped without Nvidia accelerators.
Underneath the show was a list of areas where Nvidia wants to build deeper ties with Korea: high-bandwidth storage, AI data centers, autonomous driving, robotics and physical artificial intelligence.
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Her chosen major was robotics. Huang argued that South Korea’s strength in manufacturing and technology makes it deploy its models to expand the kind of AI-driven automation that Nvidia now markets as physical AI. machines that move and move around the world not software running in the data center.
For a company whose growth is defined by training and results, robotics is the next surface it wants under its chips.
The robotics space also reflects where Nvidia sees its next leg of growth. Saturating the market for training accelerators, the company has increasingly talked about as the next frontier after physical artificial intelligence, vehicles in factories that need the same kind of computation consumed by machines, warehouses and data centers, only embodied. With its concentration of manufacturers and appetite for automation, Korea is the kind of market where this thesis is proven or stands.
Meetings are arranged. Huang intended to meet with executives from game company Crafton, including chairman Chang Byung-gyu, and senior AI management to discuss cooperation in physical AI, humanoid robotics, and AI-powered games.
The background is the interdependence that Nvidia is trying to expand. The Korean memory giants are central to Nvidia’s supply chain, and Nvidia’s demand is at the heart of their results in the AI ​​era.
Huang talks about robotics and physical AI, developing a version of the partnership that works both ways and across more sectors than focusing on the single, even big, business of selling memory to accelerators.
Whether or not robotics will translate into deals is the part of the trip that isn’t resolved. A chief executive calling a sector the next big thing at the mouth of an airport is a statement of intent, not a contract.
But Huang’s itinerary is heavy on partners outside the memory business, saying Nvidia is serious about where it thinks the Korean industrial powerhouse fits into its roadmap. The pitch is ready. Orders, if they come, come later.
