South Korea President Lee looking to open new era of AI with global tech companies

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung hosted an AI summit in San Francisco on Friday, bringing together the heads of Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and Broadcom with top South Korean business figures to accelerate efforts by Seoul to make the country a global AI powerhouse.

In opening remarks, Lee said South Korea would lead the way to a new era of AI in partnership with global technology companies.

President Lee delivered a keynote address unveiling a "San Francisco AI Declaration" that outlined South Korea's AI ambitions and its vision for technological cooperation with the United States.

"I'd like to present a vision for the future of AI and propose global cooperation to make it happen," Lee said.

"South Korea will make the leap as a key nation in the global AI supply chain."

According to South Korean officials, about 150 executives, investors, researchers and startup founders attended the summit.

On the sidelines of the conference, Nvidia and SK Group unveiled a $500 billion-plus AI initiative spanning large-scale AI data centres and next-generation memory.

As part of the agreement, SK Telecom plans to build a 2-gigawatt data centre powered by Vera Rubin chips and SK Hynix HBM4 high-bandwidth memory chips. The data centre is due online in 2027.

Lee separately met Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, before joining the South Korean government-backed summit in San Francisco.