From Government to Gaming, AI Is ‘Strengthening Korea’s Digital Foundation,’ NVIDIA Leader Says at AI Day Seoul

Following packed events in Ho Chi Minh City and Tokyo last month, the tour of NVIDIA AI Days — bringing together AI enthusiasts, developers, researchers and startups in different pockets of the world — made its latest stop in Seoul, South Korea.

Andy Lee, Inception program manager at NVIDIA, gave opening remarks at the Inception and Venture Capital reception, highlighting this year’s Inception Grand Challenge in Korea. 

Five of 100 Korean startups that applied to the challenge advanced to the finals at AI Day Seoul, where the winning team received an award from the Korean Ministry of SMEs and Startups. All five finalists were recognized with certificates from NVIDIA for reflecting the momentum of Korea’s AI startup community.

Major Korean conglomerates like Samsung, SK Group, Hyundai Motor Group and NAVER Cloud are engaged in deep AI integration.

“In the public sector, AI is already helping process documents, policies and regulatory information at scale, enabling citizens to receive the answers they need instantly,” said Shilpa Kolhatkar, global head of AI nations at NVIDIA. “Adoption is also accelerating across AI avatars, speech recognition technologies, gaming, music and the K-pop industry — innovations that together are strengthening Korea’s digital foundation.”

The numbers help showcase Korea’s expanding AI ecosystem:

Ankit Patel, senior director of developer marketing at NVIDIA, presented an all-conference session that explored agentic AI through the lens of scaling laws. He emphasized that reasoning models — the foundation of intelligent decision-making — are at the heart of the latest generation of AI.

And Kolhatkar shared how Korea is building sovereign AI models and modern AI factories tailored to national priorities through government initiatives and global partnerships.

“To build technological sovereignty and a sustainable AI foundation for the era of sovereign AI, NAVER Cloud is deepening its collaboration with NVIDIA — from GPU infrastructure to AI models and agent technologies,” said Yong-Jae Kwak, chief technology officer at NAVER Cloud, at AI Day Seoul.

At the event:

• NAVER Cloud presented on its development of an agentic AI system, detailing the process of deriving optimization insights using the NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit.
• LG AI Research showcased advanced LLM training using the NVIDIA NeMo framework, tapping into FP8 training recipes to achieve over 20% faster training and applying reasoning-aligned techniques to enhance reasoning performance to reach new levels of training efficiency. 
• Coupang Intelligent Cloud discussed how it is building Coupang’s AI factory — built with NVIDIA DGX systems based on the NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell architectures — which will deliver AI-powered solutions for demand forecasting, logistics route optimization, ad personalization and more.

“NVIDIA AI Day was a meaningful opportunity for Korean companies and startups to see cutting-edge AI technologies up close and explore new possibilities for collaboration,” said Kyungwon Cho, director of the Korean Ministry of SMEs and Startups. “The 260,000-GPU AI infrastructure announced at the recent APEC Summit will play a major role in advancing the next phase of Korea’s AI ecosystem. We expect this to help startups move faster in developing their technologies and spark new waves of innovation across industries. The Ministry of SMEs and Startups will continue working with NVIDIA to create even more opportunities for Korean startups to grow and compete globally.”

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