[Anchor]
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has concluded his whirlwind visit to South Korea. The surprise gift Huang unveiled during his meetings with major domestic companies was the joint construction of "AI Factories," the next generation of artificial intelligence data centers. While this presents a clear opportunity for us, there are also aspects that warrant caution.
Reporter Jeong Seong-jin has the story.
[Reporter]
From SK and LG to Hyundai Motor and Naver.
Jensen Huang spent today, June 8, visiting major domestic companies one after another from early in the morning to build an "AI alliance."
The gift package he had teased turned out to be "AI Factories."
[Jensen Huang/Nvidia CEO: Building AI factories is very important. If it's profitable, everyone will want more AI factories.]
An AI Factory is a next-generation AI data center capable of everything from data collection and large-scale AI model training and inference to the final creation of customized AI.
This requires massive amounts of power and semiconductors to process data, as well as manufacturing sectors such as robotics and mobility to utilize the AI models.
Over the past four days, Huang specifically targeted and visited locations connected to these AI Factories.
[Jensen Huang/Nvidia CEO: From robotics to the AI factories of the future, we are working together as one giant team.]
The goal is to have these AI Factories operational by next year. The domestic companies joining the Nvidia coalition will handle key pillars of the AI infrastructure business, including memory, communication networks, cloud services, and data center operations.
This provides an opportunity to move beyond being simple component suppliers and instead design a new infrastructure market.
However, some analysts suggest that Huang himself secured the bigger prize.
[Choi Byung-ho/Research Professor at Korea University's Human-Inspired AI Institute: (Nvidia) is looking to solidify its monopoly and completely dominate next-generation services. In that sense, Korea is a quite advantageous partner. That is likely why he came here.]
There are also significant concerns that companies could become locked into Nvidia's ecosystem, extending from hardware to software and development environments.
[Jang Young-jae/Director of KAIST Manufacturing Physical AI Research Center: The hardware itself could end up acting as nothing more than a shell, while the actual added value is captured by Nvidia. We need to develop our own independent strategies...]
Analysts say that behind his friendly image, which included appearances on entertainment shows and throwing a ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game, lies a sophisticated strategy to preemptively secure the domestic AI ecosystem.
(Reported by Yang Hyun-chul | Video by Kim Ho-jin | Graphics by Park Cheon-woong)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.