Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang hosts South Korean tech leaders at Taipei dinner to deepen AI partnerships

Jensen Huang knows how to work a room. The Nvidia CEO gathered top executives from South Korea’s biggest tech companies at a traditional Taiwanese restaurant in Taipei on June 1, turning what could have been a casual dinner into yet another strategic chess move in the global AI arms race.

The guest list read like a who’s who of Asian semiconductor and cloud infrastructure: SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung, executives from Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, and Naver Cloud CEO Kim Yu-won. Nvidia dubbed the gathering “Korean Partner Night.”

The context behind the dinner

The timing was deliberate. The dinner coincided with Computex 2026, the annual trade show in Taipei. It also preceded GTC Taipei 2026, running June 1-5, where Huang was scheduled to deliver a keynote address.

Tech media has taken to calling these dinners “trillion-dollar dinners,” a nod to Nvidia’s market capitalization and the combined economic firepower of the executives who show up.

Nvidia has deployed over 250,000 GPUs specifically tailored for sovereign AI and industrial applications within South Korea. Huang reportedly emphasized South Korea’s importance to Nvidia’s broader AI ecosystem during the evening.

Why South Korea matters to Nvidia’s AI playbook

SK Hynix has been Nvidia’s go-to supplier for HBM (high-bandwidth memory), the specialized memory stacked directly onto GPU packages. Without reliable HBM supply, Nvidia’s data center GPUs would be significantly less capable.

Samsung remains a critical second source. Nvidia has historically leaned more heavily on SK Hynix for its latest-generation memory, but maintaining Samsung as a viable supplier gives Nvidia leverage and supply chain resilience.

The inclusion of Naver Cloud and LG Electronics signals Nvidia’s ambitions beyond just chip supply. Naver operates South Korea’s dominant search engine and has been building out its own AI infrastructure. LG has been pushing into AI-driven consumer electronics and industrial automation.

What this means for investors

There were zero references to cryptocurrency, blockchain, or Web3 in any coverage of the event. Nvidia’s strategic focus has shifted almost entirely to AI infrastructure, data centers, and sovereign computing initiatives. The most advanced GPUs are being designed for and sold to data center operators running AI workloads.

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