To Jensen Huang, Korea Is a Great Restaurant
Just because a customer is famous, the shop owner mustn't put down the menu. Jensen Huang is impressive and so is NVIDIA, but the real problem is how the Korean press covers him.
To Jensen Huang, Korea is a great restaurant.
Just because a customer is famous, the shop owner mustn't put down the menu.
Jensen Huang is an impressive man.
NVIDIA is an impressive company too.
The problem isn't that he's impressive.
The problem is how the Korean press handles him.
In the Korean press these days, Jensen Huang is consumed less as a figure in industry news than as an event in himself. Whom he met, where he went, what he ate, how he rated Korea — these become the news.
Of course, scenes like that can be news too.
But when that becomes everything, the most important questions disappear.
Why did Jensen Huang come to Korea?
What is NVIDIA selling in Korea?
What is Korea gaining, and what is it giving away?
To Jensen Huang, Korea is a great restaurant.
This is not an insult.
If anything, it's close to a fairly accurate description.
Korea has HBM.
It has Samsung and SK Hynix.
It has Hyundai Motor, Naver, telecom carriers, manufacturing, game companies, and robotics firms.
The government wants AI infrastructure, and companies want AI transformation.
It can generate demand for power and data centers, too.
And above all, the press treats him like a king.
From NVIDIA's point of view, Korea is not just a customer.
Korea is a customer and a supply chain, a source of data-center demand and a testbed for manufacturing, and at the same time a stage for publicity.
How many markets are more delicious than this?
This doesn't mean Jensen Huang is doing anything wrong at all.
He is the CEO of NVIDIA.
He moves for his company's interests.
That is his job.
It's only natural for a CEO to sell his company's chips, expand its software ecosystem, lock in customers, and stabilize its supply chain.
The problem isn't NVIDIA.
The problem is Korea's sentences, which fail to read those moves properly.
The sentences of the Korean press keep running like this:
“Jensen Huang has come to Korea.”
“The AI emperor has taken notice of Korea.”
“Korea's standing has risen.”
But the industrially more accurate sentence is this one:
“NVIDIA is gaining access to Korea's HBM, power, data centers, manufacturing, cloud, and AI-transformation budgets.”
These two sentences are completely different.
In the first sentence, Korea becomes the chosen one.
In the second sentence, Korea becomes a negotiating party that holds assets.
Here lies the press's biggest problem.
It doesn't report the cards Korea holds; it reports only a foreign CEO's goodwill.
Korea is not a weak country.
It is a linchpin of the semiconductor memory supply chain, a country with manufacturing on the ground, a country with high-density digital infrastructure. It also has markets in automobiles, robotics, cloud, games, telecom, and content.
If so, the questions the press should be asking are these:
What is NVIDIA selling?
What is Korea buying?
Who uses the electricity?
Who bears the cost of the data centers?
How will we reduce lock-in to CUDA and the NVIDIA ecosystem?
What bargaining power does Korea secure in the HBM supply chain?
What is left for Korean startups and homegrown AI infrastructure?
How are AMD, domestic NPUs, and on-device AI pursued in parallel as a hedging strategy?
When these questions are left out and only the story that “Jensen Huang likes Korea” gets repeated, the news stops being industry analysis and becomes free advertising.
Just because a customer is famous, the shop owner mustn't put down the menu.
Korea can welcome NVIDIA.
It can cooperate, too.
It can buy GPUs, too.
It can build AI data centers, too.
But at the same time, it has to do the math.
Hospitality is diplomacy.
A contract is war.
Infrastructure can become an asset, or it can become dependency.
Korea's cooperating with NVIDIA is not itself the problem.
The problem is the language of the cooperation.
If Korea cooperates in the language of “thank you for coming,” it remains nothing but a customer.
If it cooperates in the language of “if you want access to our assets, let's talk terms,” Korea becomes a negotiating party.
To Jensen Huang, Korea is a great restaurant.
If so, all the more reason for Korea to act like the shop owner.
It has to know where the kitchen is.
It has to know what the costs are.
It has to know who pays the electricity bill.
It has to tell the difference between a customer becoming a regular and a customer taking over the whole shop.
And the press, rather than transcribing the customer's smile, should show the shop's price tags.
Jensen Huang is doing his sales job well.
NVIDIA sees its own interests clearly.
Now Korea has to do the same.
To Jensen Huang, Korea is a great restaurant.
The problem is that the Korean press keeps reporting the chef as if he were a waiter.
I am still 26.
It's an age to be hungry.
Being hungry doesn't only mean you haven't eaten.
It means you still have to have more, make more, sell more, and survive more.
A merchant is hungry by nature.
And a young merchant is hungrier still.
That's why I can see it.
Who came to sell what.
Who is trying to take what for free.
Who walks in as a customer and at some point tries to change the structure of the shop.
Jensen Huang is a merchant too.
He is a man who came to sell his company's goods.
It's just that those goods happen to be GPUs, CUDA, AI factories, data centers, and ecosystem lock-in.
I have no intention of blaming him.
A merchant being hungry is no sin.
If anything, a good merchant is hungry.
The problem is when a hungry merchant sits down at the table,
and the owner of the table doesn't know the price of their own food.
To Jensen Huang, Korea is a great restaurant.
And because I'm a 26-year-old merchant, I know:
A hungry merchant doesn't sit down at an empty table.
If he's smiling, it means there's definitely something to eat in front of him.