South Korea’s Lee deepens AI ties with Nvidia and OpenAI

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung brought Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Hock Tan together in San Francisco for an AI summit that coincided with South Korea’s announcement of $950 billion in new AI initiatives involving Samsung Electronics, SK Group and U.S. tech companies.

Lee used the meeting to unveil the San Francisco AI Declaration, framing South Korea as a hub for building, using and sharing AI. The declaration gave political language to a strategy that goes beyond buying software, with Seoul trying to claim a larger role in how AI systems are developed, deployed and governed.

The industrial logic is clear. South Korea already sits near the center of the semiconductor economy through Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and Reuters has reported that global AI leaders are racing to fill a shortage of faster chips needed to power and train more advanced systems. That makes chip capacity, cloud access and model partnerships a strategic issue as much as a commercial one, especially for a country trying to turn manufacturing strength into leverage in the AI supply chain.

Lee’s broader trip showed that the AI summit was only one part of a wider diplomatic push. Reuters said his 11-day itinerary also included South America and Germany, with separate summits in Brazil, Chile and Argentina. That regional sweep suggests Seoul is pairing industrial policy with foreign policy, trying to keep Korean exporters, chipmakers and technology firms closer to the top table as major economies compete to lock in AI investment.

The scale of the announcement raised the central test of Lee’s campaign. South Korea can use global tech alliances to draw capital, talent and compute into its own economy, but it will also have to decide how much influence foreign companies should gain over domestic rules on data, competition and market power. For now, Lee has made the pitch plainly: South Korea wants to be more than a customer in the AI era, and far more than a spectator in the race led by the United States and China.