Jensen Huang, the leather jacket-wearing CEO of Nvidia, spent four days in South Korea this past week doing something most tech executives never attempt: becoming a genuine pop culture figure in a foreign market while simultaneously locking down critical supply chain partnerships.
The visit, which ran from June 5 to June 8, included an appearance on the wildly popular Korean talk show “You Quiz on the Block” and a ceremonial first pitch at a Doosan Bears baseball game. Between those crowd-pleasing moments, Huang held meetings with Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Hyundai to discuss AI data centers, robotics, and autonomous driving.
Why South Korea, why now
This was Huang’s second trip to South Korea in just seven months. His previous visit came in late 2025, and the frequency tells you everything about how important this country is to Nvidia’s business.
South Korea is home to the world’s most advanced manufacturers of high-bandwidth memory chips, the specialized components that make Nvidia’s AI GPUs actually work. Samsung and SK Hynix are essentially the only companies on the planet that can produce HBM at the scale Nvidia needs.
