Nvidia CEO mounts charm push in South Korea with TV talk show and baseball appearances - The Japan Times

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's recent visit to South Korea demonstrates the company's strategic emphasis on the Korean market, combining traditional business meetings with public engagement activities like... Read original →

Jensen Huang’s high-profile Korea tour is a strategic move, not mere PR. With SK Hynix and Samsung supplying ~70% of global HBM memory—critical for NVIDIA’s Blackwell and beyond—any U.S.-Korea export control alignment could disrupt AI chip output. Huang’s cultural diplomacy aims to build a geopolitical buffer, reducing friction in a supply chain where Korea’s 3D-stacked HBM and advanced packaging are irreplaceable, even as TSMC leads logic nodes. AMD’s deepening ties with Samsung and Intel’s Foveros+HBM push force NVIDIA to lock in Korean loyalty. Within 18 months, Korean memory giants may leverage this dependence to assert pricing power and co-define physical AI standards—extending their dominance from memory into robotics and edge systems. The semiconductor race is shifting from chip specs to ecosystem control.