“Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for your partnership. Go Korea!” NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said, addressing a reception that brought together roughly 200 partners from every part of the Korea AI ecosystem, corresponding to the five‑layer cake.

“I’m very happy to be here with all of you. This is Korea’s ecosystem,” Huang said. “This is the industrial base. This is the venture investors. This is the young entrepreneurs. We brought them all together. Frankly, next year I hope to see this be 10 times larger — not two times larger, 10 times larger.”

Hosted at the Young Bin Gwan at The Shilla Seoul, the gathering rounded out Huang’s trip, which spotlighted Korea’s place at the intersection of gaming, industry and AI, and the many partnerships shaping what comes next. 

Off of a series of surprise visits to PC bangs and the announcement a week earlier of NVIDIA RTX Spark — a new superchip reinventing Windows PCs — Huang kicked off remarks on gaming and esports, tracing NVIDIA’s origins and Korea’s tech roots back to its earliest bet on computer graphics.

“Almost all great technology started out as toys,” he said. “And we realized that computer games were complicated, because they were trying to reproduce reality. Reproducing reality requires extraordinary algorithms, extraordinary computing technology. And we dreamed from that beginning, we could someday be one of the world’s most important technology companies. That was our dream. That was 33 years ago.”

That dream has “revolutionized the gaming industry,” Huang said. “It transformed an entire generation. It made video games something fun into something worthy to endeavor, to be great at. Now, Korea is the world leader in esports.”

Huang described Korea also as a “world-class leader in heavy industries” — and now in AI. 

“Now we’re sitting in a country where you are world-class at manufacturing, world-class at electronics, world-class at software — and you are now world-class at AI.”

The gathering capped off a week of meetings with partners — including LG Group, SK Group, Hyundai Motor Group, Naver and Doosan — expanding collaborations that support the nation’s AI infrastructure and setting the stage for advancements in agentic AI, physical AI and beyond. 

“You have everything that it takes,” he told the cheering crowd. “We are here to partner with you. I’m here to partner with you.”