Sawt Falasteen - Nvidia's Huang arrives in South Korea with 'surprises', bets on robotics

The visit comes about seven months after Huang's last trip to South Korea, when he pledged to supply the government and major firms including Samsung Electronics, SK Group and Naver with around 260,000 advanced chips for physical and agentic artificial intelligence.

"I have brought a lot of business to Korea. I have some surprises," he said after landing at Gimpo International Airport, declining to elaborate or "it would not be a surprise".

Huang said robotics would be the "next major sector here in South Korea", and that the country is "extraordinary at manufacturing, mechatronics, and also artificial intelligence".

"The fusion of all of that technology is perfect robotics."

He then visited a gaming cafe run by South Korean esports organisation T1, where he met star gamer Lee "Faker" Sang-Hyeok as excited fans gathered and filmed them.

Nvidia helped popularise graphics processing units (GPUs) in the late 1990s, laying the foundation for modern high-performance gaming.

Huang described South Korea as an ideal market for esports, saying the country's gamers had chosen the best GPUs to win, and that "those were Nvidia GPUs".

He later joined some of South Korea's top business leaders for a typical corporate dinner of of grilled pork belly and soju at a restaurant in Seoul's Hongdae district.

A large crowd gathered outside to catch a glimpse of the executives, who included SK Group's chair Chey Tae-won, LG Group's Koo Kwang-mo and Naver founder Lee Hae-jin.

Wearing a leather jacket, Huang was seen learning how to eat grilled pork wrapped in lettuce leaves, a popular Korean dish.

At one point, Huang and Chey stepped outside the restaurant to hand out packets of honey-banana chips launched by SK hynix and convenience store chain Seven-Eleven last year.

The snack's square shape was designed to resemble a high-bandwidth memory (HBM) semiconductor chip, a product that has become central to the global AI boom.

During his visit to Korea, Huang is also expected to throw out the first pitch at a baseball game and appear on one of the most popular TV shows in South Korea.

The visit comes as demand for Samsung and SK hynix memory chips has soared, helping support South Korea's economic growth.

SK hynix -- the main supplier of HBM products to Nvidia -- topped $1 trillion in market value last month, joining rivals Samsung and US-based Micron Technology as an AI-driven rally lifted chip stocks.

L.AbuAli--SF-PST