South Korean President Lee Jae Myung gathered some of the biggest names in the technology world at an AI summit held in San Francisco on Friday, with the goal of establishing South Korea as a leading force in global artificial intelligence.
In his opening remarks, President Lee declared that South Korea would chart a new course in AI development by working alongside major global technology firms.
Before the summit got underway, President Lee held individual meetings with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan.
The summit, backed by the South Korean government, also drew prominent business figures from South Korea, including Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Jay Y. Lee, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung, and Naver founder Lee Hae-jin.
During his keynote address, President Lee introduced what he called the “San Francisco AI Declaration,” a document laying out South Korea’s ambitions in artificial intelligence and its goals for technological partnership with the United States.
“I’d like to present a vision for the future of AI and propose global cooperation to make it happen,” President Lee told the audience.
He added, “South Korea will make the leap as a key nation in the global AI supply chain.”
South Korean officials said approximately 150 executives, investors, researchers, and startup founders were in attendance at the summit.
On the sidelines of the conference, Nvidia and SK Group announced a joint AI initiative valued at more than $500 billion, covering large-scale AI data centers and next-generation memory technology. As part of that agreement, SK Telecom plans to construct a 2-gigawatt data center that will run on Vera Rubin chips and SK Hynix HBM4 high-bandwidth memory chips, with the facility expected to come online in 2027.
