Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Talks AI Golden Age in South Korea, New Naver Investment

Summary

• Nvidia is putting hard numbers on Korea: an SK Group partnership Huang sizes at “over half $1 trillion worth of business” — long-dated HBM purchase agreements with SK Hynix plus supercomputer sales as SK Telecom builds an AI cloud “up to two gigawatts in the near future” — alongside a $1B investment in likely Naver, Korea’s leading cloud, which will scale to ~200MW and expand globally.
• The structural call: semis must 10x. Computers are no longer built just for a billion humans — “computers are being built for computers to use,” serving “100 billion agents and billions of robots.” Huang’s guess: the semiconductor industry “is probably going to have to be ten times larger than it is today over the next decade or so.”
• Everything is constrained — HBM, LPDDR3 memories, “just about every part of the supply chain,” plus land, power and construction workers. The build-out will be “throttled” for a decade: the industry “has the ability to double each year, but we’re going to have a hard time going much faster than that.”
• On US-vs-China AI (China lowers dollar-per-token, America chases token quality, per the SK chairman): Huang declines the dichotomy — “amazing people will find great answers” under either constraint set, and China “manufactures the most important version” of intelligence: the researchers. “We just got to keep on racing.” The host notes that many Chinese AI researchers are now in San Francisco.
• Huang’s first X post — sharing a letter signed by many American-company peers, with the host asking about Satya Nadella and others — is a direct rebuttal of the “open is unsafe” narrative: closed models could be jailbroken, stolen or leaked, and “single points of failure is where we have the greatest vulnerability.” His exhibit: a Hugging Face case involving two OpenAI models mistakenly accessing its systems; Hugging Face couldn’t get a closed model to help and used GLM 5.2 to find and patch the penetration — “a perfect example of massively distributed self-defense.”
• The nuance investors miss: Huang thinks closed models are frankly cheaper and tells even Nvidia to use OpenAI, Claude, Cursor, Cognition, Perplexity. Open models exist for control — proprietary alpha, regulated SLAs, sovereignty — “the idea that the world is going to be one or the other is just completely wrong.”

Deep dive

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