Nvidia’s chief executive arrived for a four-day visit pitching robotics and physical AI, and looking past the memory chips that already bind the company to Korea.
Jensen Huang made the pitch before he had left the airport. Arriving at Gimpo for a four-day visit to Seoul, the Nvidia chief executive told reporters that “robotics is going to be the next major sector here in Korea,” framing the country’s manufacturing depth as the reason it is well placed to lead in AI-driven automation.
The line set the theme for a trip designed to push Nvidia’s relationship with Korea past the memory chips it already depends on.
The visit was as much performance as business. Huang’s schedule mixed executive meetings with a television talk-show slot and baseball appearances, a charm offensive in a country that supplies the high-bandwidth memory Nvidia’s accelerators cannot ship without.
The substance underneath the spectacle was a list of areas where Nvidia wants deeper Korean ties: high-bandwidth memory, AI data centres, autonomous driving, robotics, and physical AI.
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Robotics was the one he chose to headline. South Korea’s strength across manufacturing and technology, Huang argued, positions it to scale the kind of AI-driven automation Nvidia is now selling as physical AI, the application of its models to machines that move and act in the world rather than software that runs in a data centre.
For a company whose growth has been defined by training and inference, robotics is the next surface it wants its chips underneath.
The robotics pitch also reflects where Nvidia sees its own next leg of growth. Having saturated the market for training accelerators, the company has increasingly talked up physical AI as the frontier that comes after, machines in factories, warehouses, and vehicles that need the same kind of compute the data centre consumes, only embodied. Korea, with its concentration of manufacturers and its appetite for automation, is the kind of market where that thesis either proves out or stalls.
The meetings were arranged to match. Huang was set to meet executives from the gaming company Krafton, including chairman Chang Byung-gyu and senior AI leadership, to discuss collaboration in physical AI, humanoid robotics, and AI-powered gaming, an agenda that signalled Nvidia’s interest in Korean partners well beyond the chipmakers that have historically defined the relationship.
The backdrop is a mutual dependency Nvidia is trying to broaden. Korea’s memory giants are central to Nvidia’s supply chain, and Nvidia’s demand has been central to their AI-era results.
By talking up robotics and physical AI, Huang is sketching a version of the partnership that runs in both directions and across more sectors, rather than resting on the single, if enormous, business of selling memory into his accelerators.
Whether the robotics framing turns into deals is the part the trip did not settle. A chief executive calling a sector the next big thing during an airport doorstep is a statement of intent, not a contract.
But Huang’s itinerary, heavy on partners outside the memory business, suggested Nvidia is serious about where it thinks Korean industrial strength meets its own roadmap. The pitch has been made. The orders, if they come, come later.
