Jensen Huang knows how to work a dinner table. The Nvidia CEO gathered top South Korean tech executives at a traditional Taiwanese restaurant in Taipei on June 1, hosting what’s being called the first-ever “Korean Partner Night.”
The guest list read like a who’s-who of Korea’s tech elite: SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung, plus executives from Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, and Naver. The setting was Computex, the annual trade show that has become ground zero for AI hardware announcements.
Why Korean chipmakers matter to Nvidia’s AI ambitions
Nvidia designs the GPUs that power everything from ChatGPT to autonomous vehicles, but it doesn’t manufacture the memory chips those GPUs depend on. That critical component, high-bandwidth memory (HBM), comes primarily from two sources: SK Hynix and Samsung.
SK Hynix has been the dominant force in HBM production, essentially becoming Nvidia’s preferred partner for the memory that goes into its data center GPUs. Samsung has been working to close the gap, and both companies are racing to develop next-generation memory chips that can keep pace with Nvidia’s increasingly power-hungry AI accelerators.
The presence of LG Electronics and Naver, South Korea’s largest internet company, suggests the conversation extended into broader AI infrastructure, from hardware integration to the software and services layer that sits on top of Nvidia’s silicon.
The Computex context and Huang’s Asia tour
Huang isn’t stopping at dinner. He’s expected to visit South Korea around June 4 for additional discussions with Korean partners. The CEO himself described the upcoming period as “incredibly busy.”
Korean tech stocks rallied in response to the event, with investors reading the dinner as a bullish signal for expanded AI collaborations between Nvidia and its Korean supply chain partners.
What this means for the AI supply chain
For SK Hynix, the dinner reinforces its position as Nvidia’s go-to HBM supplier, a relationship that has already proven enormously profitable. SK Hynix’s stock has been one of the top performers in the Korean market over the past two years, driven largely by demand for its HBM chips from Nvidia and other AI chipmakers.
For Samsung, the event represents an opportunity to deepen its engagement with Nvidia at a time when it’s been playing catch-up in the HBM space. Samsung has struggled with yield issues that have kept it behind SK Hynix in securing Nvidia contracts.
The inclusion of Naver is perhaps the most interesting wrinkle. South Korea’s dominant search and e-commerce platform has been aggressively investing in AI, building its own large language models and cloud infrastructure.