Nvidia and Korea ministry plan AI R&D hub to boost startups

This hub is another brick in South Korea’s attempt to become a sovereign AI heavyweight rather than just an Nvidia customer. By pairing national policy with a vendor‑embedded R&D center, Korea is trying to ensure that the skills, libraries, and model‑specific know‑how needed to exploit hundreds of thousands of GPUs actually live inside its startup and research ecosystem. For Nvidia, embedding more deeply in a country that is already committing vast sums to GPUs and AI factories is a way to lock in long‑term demand and influence local standards.

For the AGI race, this matters less as a single facility and more as part of a compounded effect: sovereign clouds, national AI factories, and co‑located R&D talent all make it easier to spin up large‑scale experimentation with new architectures and agentic systems outside the traditional US–China duopoly. Korea already has aggressive plans for a quarter‑million Nvidia GPUs across public and private clouds; a local R&D hub means more of the algorithmic innovation on top of that compute could happen in Korean institutions rather than just importing models from abroad.