The AI summit that South Korean President Lee Jae Myung convenes in San Francisco tomorrow is organized around two major growth drivers of the global AI revolution: high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and a national commitment to build data centers at scale. The discussions are expected to focus on both, alongside broader questions on AI rules and regulations. The outcome will shape the direction of technology investment and private-sector partnership between the United States and Korea.<\/p>\n
U.S. and Korean industry leaders, including NVIDIA\u2019s Jensen Huang, OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman, Broadcom\u2019s Hock Tan, Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei, Samsung Electronics\u2019 Lee Jae-yong, SK Group\u2019s Chey Tae-won, Hyundai Motor Group\u2019s Chung Eui-sun, and Naver Corporation\u2019s Lee Hae-jin, will also attend Friday\u2019s summit. The concentration of the largest voices in AI for the Korean president\u2019s visit reflects the\u00a0growing importance<\/a>\u00a0of Korea in the global AI ecosystem and will likely inject new momentum in the U.S.-Korea AI partnership.<\/p>\n The main thrust of the conversations will likely be Korea\u2019s support for AI infrastructure in the United States and its provision of cutting-edge HBM chips used in graphics processing units (GPUs) that supply AI data centers for large language models (LLMs). Samsung and SK Hynix collectively account for\u00a0some 80 percent<\/a>\u00a0of the global market share for HBM chips, serving as the basis for a growing retinue of partnerships with U.S. firms to maintain and develop supply chains for compute power in AI. Korean HBM chip exports are particularly salient as they likely\u00a0helped shield the country\u2019s economy<\/a>\u00a0from some of the hardest impacts of the war in Iran.<\/p>\n The U.S. CEOs meeting with President Lee in San Francisco may use the summit as an opportunity to gain greater access to advanced Korean memory chips and strengthen investment ties between the two countries.\u00a0<\/p>\n Likewise, Korea\u2019s\u00a0growing investments<\/a>\u00a0in its own domestic data centers require substantial deployment of U.S. GPUs, necessitating new and major private-sector partnerships. In June 2026, President Lee announced a\u00a0\u201cmegaprojects\u201d blueprint<\/a>\u00a0for semiconductors, physical AI, and AI data centers, including a KRW 550 trillion investment in data centers by 2029.\u00a0\u00a0Earlier this year, Shinsegae, a large Korean conglomerate, announced a\u00a0250 MW data center<\/a>\u00a0with U.S.-based Reflection AI\u2014the largest data center built by a Korean company and the first partnership agreement under the U.S. Department of Commerce\u2019s American AI Exports Program. And notably, on the sidelines of the 2025 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Korea, NVIDIA pledged to deploy\u00a0a quarter million GPUs<\/a>\u00a0across Korea to support cloud infrastructure. A major feature of Friday\u2019s discussions may center on U.S. tech companies\u2019 involvement and support in such projects, particularly in the form of strategic investment cooperation. Korea\u2019s\u00a0robust startup culture<\/a>around AI shops may also provide a substantial area for partnerships and investment cooperation between domestic Korean startup ventures and Silicon Valley\u2019s tech ecosystem.<\/p>\n An additional area ripe for cooperation could center on Korea\u2019s role in shaping AI governance and its place in the global AI ecosystem. At the AI Seoul Summit in May 2024, the United States announced the\u00a0International Network of AI Safety Institutes<\/a>, with Korea as one of the inaugural members, and San Francisco served as the\u00a0first meeting location<\/a>\u00a0later that year. This year\u2019s Group of Seven (G7) summit in France, attended by Lee, also discussed the participating countries\u2019 collective efforts toward AI safety, leading to a declaration by G7 members to work with AI companies for the \u201csafe and beneficial deployment<\/a>\u201d of AI. Likewise, Anthropic\u2019s recent office expansion in Korea materialized alongside a\u00a0memorandum of understanding (MOU)<\/a>\u00a0with Korea\u2019s Ministry of Science and ICT to advance AI safety, marking greater integration between Silicon Valley\u2019s private sector and the Korean government to work together on building resiliency against digital threats.\u00a0<\/p>\n The potential for adversarial entities and rogue actors to misuse advanced AI models for nuclear proliferation, malicious cyber operations, and large-scale disinformation campaigns hastens the pace at which tech leaders in both the United States and Korea should establish agreements on the use of AI globally, including which guardrails should be in place and how digital governance is coordinated. President Lee\u2019s apparently forthcoming \u201cSan Francisco AI Declaration<\/a>\u201d will outline the administration\u2019s priorities here, such as determining the tools to safely and equitably share AI technologies with partner countries.\u00a0<\/p>\n Overall, the outcome of Lee\u2019s visit to San Francisco will help set the future direction of technology investments and private-sector partnerships between the two countries. Korea first iterated plans to become a \u201ctop three AI global power<\/a>\u201d in 2024, and the Lee administration instituted a National AI Strategy Committee to help\u00a0facilitate that goal<\/a>\u00a0in 2025, calling it a \u201csurvival strategy\u201d for Korea\u2019s future.\u00a0<\/p>\n