AI Strengthening Korea’s Digital Foundation: Highlights From NVIDIA AI Day Seoul
After successful gatherings in Ho Chi Minh City and Tokyo earlier this year, the NVIDIA AI Days global tour continued its momentum with a major stop in Seoul, South Korea, drawing together a highly engaged audience of more than 1,000 developers, AI enthusiasts, startup founders, investors, researchers, and enterprise leaders. The event showcased how AI innovation — from sovereign AI models to physical and agentic AI systems — is accelerating technological transformation across Korea’s public and private sectors.
Featuring hands-on technical sessions, developer workshops, investor networking, and a special showcase of entrepreneurial talent through the Inception Grand Challenge, NVIDIA AI Day Seoul illustrated the rapid and far-reaching impact of AI throughout the country.
Growing the AI Startup Community
The event opened with remarks from Andy Lee, Inception Program Manager at NVIDIA, who addressed participants at the Inception and Venture Capital reception — a gathering designed to foster collaboration between investors and emerging AI companies. Lee highlighted the importance of Korea’s AI ecosystem and celebrated the strength and diversity reflected in more than 100 applications submitted for this year’s Inception Grand Challenge.
Five startups were selected as finalists and advanced to compete live during the conference. The winning team was honored on stage with an award presented by the Korean Ministry of SMEs and Startups, while all five finalists received certificates from NVIDIA acknowledging their innovation and leadership in Korea’s AI startup landscape.
One of the finalists, PYLER, shared insight into their journey collaborating with NVIDIA.
We were thrilled to be named a finalist for the Inception Grand Challenge,” said Jaeho Oh, CEO of PYLER. “The strong support from the Inception program allowed us to become the first in South Korea to adopt an NVIDIA DGX B200 system, which is critical to advancing our work in safe and reliable video understanding AI.
The reception served not only as a platform to celebrate achievement but also as evidence of how NVIDIA’s ecosystem — through programs like NVIDIA Inception — supports early-stage companies building the future of AI infrastructure and applications.
Why Korea Matters in the Global AI Landscape
At the heart of the event was the theme of sovereign AI — the concept of building national AI capability independent of external control. Korea’s rapidly maturing AI sector has been shaped by strategic investment, public-private partnerships, and collaboration with major technology providers, including NVIDIA.
Shilpa Kolhatkar, Global Head of AI Nations at NVIDIA, underscored the broad reach of AI transformation across Korean industries.
AI is already playing a critical role in processing public-sector data for regulatory and policy needs, improving access to government services and helping citizens receive the information they require instantly,” she said. “Meanwhile, adoption is accelerating across gaming, speech recognition, digital avatars, music, and the global K-pop industry — innovations that together are strengthening Korea’s digital foundation.
Across Korea, several industry-leading corporations — including Samsung, SK Group, Hyundai Motor Group, LG, NAVER Cloud, and Coupang — are investing heavily in AI-driven solutions spanning robotics, autonomous systems, chip design, industrial manufacturing, large-scale AI model deployment, logistics optimization, digital healthcare, and consumer entertainment.
The enthusiasm across sectors illustrates a rapidly expanding marketplace where AI capability is seen as central to South Korea’s global competitiveness.
Event Sessions and Developer Collaboration
NVIDIA AI Day Seoul featured a range of technical experiences, including four NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute training sessions, numerous breakout sessions tailored to industry application areas, and an “Ask the NVIDIA Tech Experts” zone, where attendees could speak directly with NVIDIA engineers specializing in AI infrastructure, high-performance computing, robotics, automotive technologies, and large language models (LLMs).
For many participants, direct contact with experts was the highlight.
The best part of AI Day Seoul was the opportunity to directly ask questions and engage with NVIDIA technical experts,” shared Useong Kim, Principal Engineer at Samsung Electronics. “In-person communication is incredibly valuable — the real-time feedback was practical and deeply insightful.
The agenda also included plenary sessions from several NVIDIA leaders.
- Ankit Patel, Senior Director of Developer Marketing at NVIDIA, delivered a keynote focused on the evolution of agentic AI, exploring scaling laws and the shift toward models capable of autonomous reasoning and decision-making.
- Marc Hamilton, Vice President of Global Solutions Architecture and Engineering, discussed how AI factories are converging with physical AI, marking a shift toward robotics and real-world deployment environments.
- Kolhatkar addressed how Korea is building modern AI factories and sovereign AI models tailored to national priorities through government initiatives and cross-border research collaboration.
Industry Partnerships Driving Korea’s AI Future
Many of NVIDIA’s Korea-based partners presented updates on their latest AI development efforts, illustrating how AI technologies are already reshaping production pipelines and end-user experiences.
NAVER Cloud
NAVER Cloud announced deepening collaboration with NVIDIA as part of building a sustainable roadmap for sovereign AI.
To build technological sovereignty, we are expanding our partnership with NVIDIA — from GPU infrastructure to agent technologies and AI model development,” said Yong-Jae Kwak, CTO at NAVER Cloud.
NAVER Cloud showcased progress on an agentic AI system using NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit, demonstrating techniques for optimization and insight discovery.
LG AI Research
LG AI Research presented results using the NVIDIA NeMo framework for large language model training, sharing how FP8-based training delivered more than 20% improvement in training speed, while reasoning-based enhancements significantly boosted inference quality and accuracy.
Coupang Intelligent Cloud
Coupang highlighted progress in building an internal AI factory powered by NVIDIA DGX systems using Hopper and Blackwell infrastructure. The system is designed to support next-generation logistics and commerce operations, including:
- Predictive demand modeling
- Route optimization
- Personalized advertising and recommendation systems
- Real-time supply chain intelligence
These initiatives reflect Korea’s strong appetite for AI transformation across industrial and consumer domains.
NVIDIA AI Day Seoul not only celebrated innovation already taking shape across Korea but also pointed toward an ambitious future in which AI plays a foundational role across government infrastructure, industrial systems, research institutions, and global-scale businesses.
The event demonstrated that Korea’s AI momentum is accelerating — powered by a rich talent pool, dynamic startups, world-class technology companies, and collaboration with partners like NVIDIA.
As NVIDIA continues its global AI Days tour, Seoul stands out as a vibrant hub where innovation, investment, and community energy converge — strengthening Korea’s position among the world’s most forward-thinking digital economies.
Source Link:https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-day-seoul/
