South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has opened an 11-day overseas tour with a technology-heavy stop in San Francisco, where meetings with four leading U.S. executives are intended to turn Seoul’s artificial-intelligence and semiconductor plans into working partnerships.
According to the South Korean government, Lee’s July 24–25 schedule includes talks with Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang and Broadcom president and chief executive Hock Tan.
Three national projects meet Silicon Valley
Lee is also due to attend the San Francisco AI Summit. The agenda is tied to three national megaprojects announced by his government in June: semiconductors, AI data centres and physical AI, a field that connects machine intelligence with robots, industrial equipment and other systems that act in the physical world.
The choice of executives maps closely to those priorities. Nvidia is the dominant supplier of accelerators used to train and run advanced AI models; Broadcom is a major provider of networking and custom-chip technology; and Anthropic and OpenAI are among the companies setting the pace in foundation models and AI services.
For South Korea, the diplomatic test is whether the meetings can connect the country’s strength in memory chips and manufacturing with more of the software, compute and investment layers of the AI economy. The government has described AI and semiconductors as core drivers of future growth.
Startups and supply chains follow
On July 25, Lee is scheduled to attend a Silicon Valley venture-investment meetup designed to link Korean startups with global venture-capital firms. The government says the forum is intended to expand overseas funding opportunities and connect the Korean and U.S. venture ecosystems.
After the U.S. stop, Lee’s itinerary continues through Brazil, Chile and Argentina, with a stop in Frankfurt on the return journey. Seoul says the wider tour will combine technology cooperation with supply-chain diversification and economic-security partnerships, particularly with resource-rich Latin American economies.
Source: Korea.net, the official website of the Republic of Korea. Image: Lee Jae Myung portrait, The White House via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
