Lee rallies global AI giants to drive trillion-won projects

Dec 08, 2025, 09:10 am

		0
President Lee Jae-myung meets with SoftBank Group Chairman Masayoshi Son at the presidential office in Yongsan, Seoul, on December 5 to discuss cooperation on artificial intelligence. President Lee shakes hands with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang before their meeting at the HICO convention center during the APEC summit in Gyeongju on October 31. / Source: Yonhap News

Marking his sixth month in office, President Lee Jae-myung is accelerating South Korea’s drive to become one of the world’s top three AI powers. Over the past half-year, he has held back-to-back meetings with global titans in AI and investment, translating those engagements into concrete projects worth tens of trillions of won.

Lee met with BlackRock Chairman Larry Fink, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, AWS CEO Matt Garman, and SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son, underscoring what he has called South Korea’s “core survival strategy” of emerging as a leading AI nation. According to the presidential office, these meetings have already catalyzed major foreign investments and large-scale overseas contracts for Samsung and SK — momentum expected to boost Lee’s broader “AI sales diplomacy.”

On December 5, Lee met Son at the Yongsan presidential office and stressed the importance of Korea–Japan cooperation on AI. Following the meeting, South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and Arm, a SoftBank subsidiary, agreed to establish an “Arm School” in Korea to train roughly 1,400 semiconductor design specialists.

The Arm initiative adds to a series of major developments since Lee took office: AWS and OpenAI’s plans for domestic AI data centers, Samsung and SK’s participation in the $700 billion U.S. Stargate supercomputer and data center program, and Nvidia’s decision to supply 260,000 GPUs to Korean partners.

OpenAI and SK plan to build an AI data center in South Jeolla Province, while Samsung and OpenAI will construct another in Pohang. AWS will establish AI-focused data centers in Incheon and the greater Gyeonggi region. All of these projects — domestic investments and overseas contracts alike — have taken shape within Lee’s first six months. At each meeting with global AI figures, Lee repeatedly emphasized that “Korea is the best place in the world to launch and scale AI-related businesses.”

To support Samsung and SK’s participation in the U.S. Stargate project, Lee’s administration even revisited the long-avoided issue of the separation between industrial and financial capital — signaling how central the AI agenda is to his governance. The government has also allocated 10.1 trillion won in next year’s budget for AI — more than triple the amount from the previous year.

After his meeting with Son, Lee wrote on social media that AI will soon become “a new public infrastructure, like water, electricity, and roads.” He pledged to “improve people’s lives through technology and build an ‘AI Basic Society’ in which every citizen can benefit equally,” adding that his administration will move “with even greater urgency” to realize that vision.

#AI Basic Society #Lee Jae-myung AI diplomacy #Arm School Korea #Global AI investment #Stargate supercomputer project