Aju Press - Asia News Hub

Journalist

Kim Dong-young김동영

ReporterSamsung Biologics, CJ CheilJedang, LG Chem, Celltrion, Naver, Krafton, Nexon, Hyundai Mobis etc. & energy, game, food, bio, petrochemical, AI

Kim Dong-young is a bilingual journalist at AJU Press (AJP), covering Korean tech, energy, and bio/pharma.
He reports from the field at events like CES and APEC, runs AJP's YouTube channels,
and is pursuing a master's at Sogang's MOT program. "I try everything in this AI era that can improve yet preserve the facts. Journalism still serves as my core."

Latest by Kim Dong-young

Kakao to stage first-ever strike as pay dispute deepens SEOUL, June 09 (AJP) - The labor union at Kakao, South Korea's dominant messaging and fintech operator, will hold its first walkout in the company's history, marking a turning point in a protracted dispute over performance-based pay. The action is the first since the founding of IweLab, Kakao's predecessor, in 2006, the union said. It comes after a second round of mediation at the Gyeonggi Regional Labor Relations Commission collapsed in late May, granting the union the legal right to strike. According to the IT industry, labor circles and police, the union will stage a partial strike of about five hours from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Wednesday and rally near Kakao's Pangyo office in Seongnam, south of Seoul. Members are expected to condemn what they call management failures and demand job security. With wage and collective-bargaining talks deadlocked, the union is also seeking an overhaul of a compensation system it says rewards executives while leaving rank-and-file pay opaque despite improving earnings. From 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., members will march about 800 meters from the Pangyo office to the U space building, around one kilometer away. The union initially notified police that some 2,000 members would gather from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., but officers estimate about 600 will turn out. Police plan to deploy one company of about 80 officers for traffic safety, anticipating a peaceful march. The walkout is unlikely to seriously disrupt flagship services such as KakaoTalk, used by about 40 million people monthly, or Kakao Pay, as essential staff remain on duty and core systems are automated. Analysts caution, however, that a prolonged strike could erode the company's ability to respond to sudden outages. The firm responded that it would keep services running, adding that it would establish the necessary response system. 2026-06-09 17:14:19
Pulmuone breaks ground on Korea's first land-based laver farm SEOUL, June 09 (AJP) - Pulmuone announced it had broken ground on South Korea's first research center for land-based cultivation of laver, or gim, at the Saemangeum national industrial complex, marking a push to commercialize a technology that could free the prized seaweed from the vagaries of the open sea. The center, built under a state project led by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, will serve as a testbed for growing laver on land year-round, the food company said Tuesday. The 9,473-square-metre site will house cultivation tanks, seawater treatment systems and research facilities in a single integrated complex. At its heart will sit a bioreactor system, billed as the largest of its kind in the country, that fine-tunes temperature, light and nutrients to yield a steady harvest regardless of season. The first phase focuses on core infrastructure, with a second stage to add processing and storage buildings and sharply expand tank capacity. Pulmuone has chased the technology since 2021, winning a marine farming license in 2024 and running pilot studies with 10-ton tanks in Taean, on the country's west coast. The company aims to weave production, processing and distribution into a single industrial chain anchored in Saemangeum. The firm plans to share its model with local fishers and buy up their entire harvest, building what it called a virtuous cycle of stable rural income and reliable raw material. Beyond output, it frames the venture as a hedge against climate shocks and a step toward restoring marine ecosystems. "The Saemangeum R&D center will be an important turning point for proving and industrialising land-based laver farming technology," said Ahn Deok-jun, head of food tech division at Pulmuone. 2026-06-09 10:06:45
For Nvidia CEO, South Korea is where story keeps turning SEOUL, June 8 (AJP) - In the early 2000s, as the story goes, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang walked the cramped aisles of Seoul's Yongsan electronics market himself, a then-obscure chip merchant doling out his business cards, courting the distributors who might stock his graphics cards. Just last weekend, he returned to the gaming world that first bought what he was selling — this time as the most courted man in artificial intelligence. The Nvidia CEO made his way to a PC parlor near Sinnonhyeon Station in southern Seoul on Sunday, his third such visit in a single trip, and met game developer Krafton's executive director Chang Byung-gyu and NCSoft CEO Kim Taek-jin in quick succession over the very games his cards were built to run. "Nvidia grew up together with you," Huang told the South Korean game executives, casting the country's studios as both the cradle of his company and a pillar of its AI ambitions. To Kim, he offered a smaller tribute: "You are my wingman." South Korea has earned the sentiment. Its gamers have bought more than 50 million GeForce GPUs over 25 years, Nvidia said last year, and the country has long served as a fast-moving testbed for nearly everything the company ships. But South Korea has dealt Huang sharp lessons too. In 2018, he flew to Seoul to propose a sweeping partnership with Samsung Electronics spanning high-bandwidth memory, contract chipmaking and his CUDA software platform. Samsung turned him down. Whatever the details, the cost has compounded by the year. Rival SK hynix rode HBM to the heart of the AI boom and became Nvidia's main supplier of the memory, while Samsung has spent the past two years scrambling to qualify its own chips and close the gap. Yet the warmest thread runs back furthest of all. At a GeForce 25th-anniversary event in Seoul last October, Huang told the crowd that a 1996 letter from the late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee was the reason he had come — a remark that prompted the chairman's son, Lee Jae-yong, to reveal that his father had written it. If South Korea is where Huang's story keeps turning, its game makers now mark the latest bend. Long the biggest buyers of his chips, they are being recast as partners that build the lifelike virtual worlds in which the next generation of AI can be tested. The logic is straightforward. Years of running massive multiplayer servers, rendering vast virtual worlds and animating believable characters have left Korean studios with precisely the tools AI now demands — environments where agents, digital twins and physical-AI systems can be trained and proven before they reach the real world. Krafton, which co-developed a generative AI "co-playable character" with Nvidia, will roll out an AI companion called PUBG Ally as a beta in PUBG: Battlegrounds Arcade this month, building on the "Smart Zoi" agent in its life-simulation title inZOI. The technology lets a character converse and play naturally alongside a human user. "Krafton has come this far thanks to the fans who have stayed with Battlegrounds for so long," Chang said. "Building on our partnership with Nvidia, we will create new experiences not only in games but in AI." NCSoft, for its part, has seen its MMO shooter Cinder City tapped to headline Nvidia showcases at home and at Germany's Gamescom, chosen to flaunt the chipmaker's RTX and latest Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology — a tool Huang recently called the most important innovation in graphics. The studio is putting the next-generation DLSS through its paces in Cinder City and its forthcoming Aion 2. On his first day in the country Huang headed straight for a PC parlor run by esports club T1 — the merchant who once worked Yongsan's aisles, back among the machines that started it all, in the one market that has never let him take success for granted. 2026-06-08 14:55:10
Aei Robot taps Nvidia tools to cut humanoid training costs SEOUL, June 08 (AJP) - South Korean humanoid robot developer Aei Robot announced it has reached a key milestone in bipedal robot development by harnessing Nvidia's motion-generation and inverse-kinematics tools, sharply lowering the cost of gathering the training data that machines need to learn human tasks. The announcement came as Aei Robot prepared to meet Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang later Monday, the final day of his four-day South Korea trip, during which the chip giant has courted Korean firms across memory, robotics and gaming to build out a "physical AI" ecosystem. The company built a "Motion Factory" system around Nvidia Kimodo, a natural-language model that spins out three-dimensional, full-body motion sequences from plain instructions such as "lift the box and place it on the shelf." Unlike vision-based capture, which can miss obscured movements, the tool generates comprehensive data from every angle. To carry that data onto physical robots, Aei Robot adopted Nvidia SOMA Retargeter, a GPU-accelerated library built on the open SOMA framework. Drawing on Nvidia's standard skeleton architecture, the system reads unified robot description format data to adapt swiftly to new platforms, removing a long-standing bottleneck in research and development. The firm expects the integration to prove especially potent at shipyards and construction sites, where it can safely simulate and collect motion data off-limits in the real world for security reasons. Aei Robot, a member of the Nvidia Inception program for startups, saw its humanoid ALICE featured in a keynote video at GTC 2026. Its chief technology officer is Hanyang University robotics professor Han Jae-kwon, whose lab has long argued that a humanoid's worth lies in useful labor rather than spectacle. "If Kimodo is the data factory that mass-produces rich behavioral data, then SOMA Retargeter is the smart connector that lets us inject that data into a robot of any shape instantly," CEO Eom Yoon-seal said, calling mastery of Nvidia's accelerated computing pipeline the firm's core edge in reaching market fastest. Huang, who has described robotics as the next major growth sector for South Korea, is scheduled to meet AI and robotics startups at a Seoul hotel on Monday evening, capping a visit that included talks with SK, LG, Hyundai and Naver. 2026-06-08 10:31:02
Nvidia, Doosan to collaborate on physical AI, data center infrastructure SEOUL, June 08 (AJP) - Nvidia and South Korea's Doosan Group announced they will expand their partnership across physical AI, robotics and AI factory infrastructure, the latest in a string of deals struck during CEO Jensen Huang's visit to Seoul. The collaboration spans four Doosan units — Doosan Robotics, Doosan Bobcat, Doosan Enerbility and Doosan Corporation Electro-Materials BG — pairing Nvidia's accelerated computing platforms with the conglomerate's strengths in industrial automation, power generation and advanced electronics materials. Doosan Robotics is integrating Nvidia's Isaac robotics frameworks, Cosmos foundation models and Jetson Thor chips to advance its Agentic Robot OS, a step meant to carry the firm beyond robot arms toward a full-stack, AI-first robotics business. The companies will also develop reference cases for tasks such as depalletizing and sanding, alongside dual-arm and humanoid platforms. On the energy side, Doosan Enerbility is weighing how its gas turbines, steam turbines and small modular reactors could feed the relentless power appetite of AI data centers, while its Electro-Materials arm supplies copper clad laminate, a foundational material for high-performance printed circuit boards used in AI servers. The agreement landed the same day Nvidia unveiled a multi-year memory partnership with SK hynix to develop next-generation chips for AI data centers, as well as a separate tie-up with Naver, capping a high-profile trip that has seen Huang dine with Korea's top corporate chiefs and warn that the global memory shortage could persist for years. 2026-06-08 09:41:41
Nvidia deepens South Korea push with Naver, SK hynix pacts SEOUL, June 08 (AJP) - Nvidia tightened its grip on South Korea's artificial intelligence buildout, unveiling parallel partnerships with Naver to construct a gigawatt-scale AI factory and with SK hynix to co-develop next-generation memory for its computing platforms. The dual announcements made Monday, timed to CEO Jensen Huang's visit to Seoul, underscore how the chip giant is weaving itself into the country's two pillars of the AI economy: hyperscale infrastructure and the high-bandwidth memory that powers it. Under the Naver agreement, the two companies will build a gigawatt-scale global AI factory spanning Asia, the Middle East and Europe, with Naver serving as a core partner that shares both the risks and rewards. Construction begins in 2027 with a 55-megawatt phase, scaling to 200 MW by 2028. A single gigawatt is about four times the maximum capacity of "Gak Sejong," Naver's largest domestic data center, and could house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia's latest GPUs. The facilities will run on Nvidia's DSX platform, fused with Naver's homegrown GPU cluster expertise to drive down token costs. Separately, SK hynix said it had forged a multi-year technology partnership to co-develop advanced memory aligned with Nvidia's infrastructure roadmap, deepening years of close collaboration. The chipmaker will supply memory for Nvidia's Vera Rubin AI supercomputer, Vera CPU, RTX Spark PC and Jetson Thor robotics platform, pushing into AI infrastructure, personal AI and physical AI. "AI factories are the engines of the next industrial revolution, and advanced memory is essential to their performance," Huang said, calling SK hynix an exceptional partner. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said the pact reflected the depth of the two firms' work together. The companies will also accelerate chip design and manufacturing using Nvidia software, with SK hynix tapping the CUDA-X libraries and Omniverse tools to build a "digital twin" of its fabs and move toward fully autonomous plant operations. Naver, meanwhile, recently became the first South Korean firm to join Nvidia's Nemotron Coalition. 2026-06-08 09:26:37
Hyundai Chair to skip Huang's Seoul 'samso' dinner, plans separate meeting SEOUL, June 05 (AJP) - Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Eui-sun will not attend a dinner with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other Korean conglomerate heads held Friday, opting instead for a separate encounter with the chip leader next week, industry sources said. Chung withdrew from the so-called "samso" gathering — named for the samgyeopsal grilled pork belly and soju on the menu — citing a scheduling conflict, the sources said. The dinner, at a restaurant near Hongdae in western Seoul, marks Huang's first such gathering since his October visit. Huang, who arrived Friday for a four-day trip, was expected to dine with SK Group Chair Chey Tae-won, LG Group Chair Koo Kwang-mo and Naver founder Lee Hae-jin. Samsung Electronics Chair Lee Jae-yong who hosted Huang at a Seoul fried-chicken restaurant in October in a meeting dubbed the "kkanbu gathering," is also absent this time owing to overseas commitments. Chung instead plans to receive Huang on June 8 at Hyundai's headquarters in Yangjae, southern Seoul, the sources said. Huang's wider itinerary includes stops at LG Twin Towers, Seoul National University and Naver's offices. Hyundai and Nvidia have deepened ties since the October meeting, when they signed a memorandum to advance physical AI in Korea and pledged about $3 billion to build an Nvidia technology center and a Hyundai application hub. The companies are also collaborating to upgrade Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid robot. 2026-06-05 14:41:40
Nvidia CEO's Seoul trip signals shift from chip buyer to physical-AI partner SEOUL, June 5 (AJP) - When Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang stepped off his plane at Gimpo International Airport on Friday and made an esports cafe his first stop, the image was familiar: the chip merchant returning to the gaming culture that built him. The substance of this visit, however, points somewhere far off. This trip is less about who buys Nvidia's graphics cards than about who can help the company teach machines to act in the physical world. South Korea, a manufacturing power with chips, robots and factories in equal measure, is being recast from customer to co-developer. The pivot has a clear starting line. At the APEC summit in the southeastern city of Gyeongju last October, Huang unveiled a plan to deploy more than 260,000 Nvidia GPUs across South Korea, with Samsung, SK Group, Hyundai Motor Group and Naver each building artificial intelligence (AI)-dedicated factories to anchor the rollout. That announcement seeded the infrastructure. The current visit is about putting it to work, turning raw computing capacity into trained systems that can drive cars, run assembly lines and move robots through real space. The distinction matters because physical AI is where the next phase of the industry is being fought. Cloud-based chatbots run on data centers alone, but robots and self-driving cars must perceive, decide and act in a messy physical world, and the companies that can supply both the hardware and the real-world testing grounds stand to capture the value. Few countries pair those strengths as tightly as Korea. "Hyundai Motor has already said it would put Atlas to work on its factory floors. Korean firms are increasingly stressing automation through physical AI, embedding it in cars and then in humanoids," said Dr. Bum-jae You, principal research scientist and former head of humanoid development at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology. Nowhere is that clearer than at LG. Huang is expected to meet LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo today, in talks centered squarely on physical AI, and the market has taken notice: shares of LG Electronics have more than tripled this year, hitting their daily limit twice on hopes of a deeper Nvidia tie-up. "LG isn't widely known for this outside the company, but internally it has been working on a mobile-controlled, two-armed home robot," said You. "Because it is a machine that could work in both factories and homes, it could stand out all the more as physical AI." LG Electronics has spent the past year pushing aggressively into the field, anchoring its effort on the AI home robot it calls CLOiD while developing actuators, robot sensing and smart-factory systems. It already runs Nvidia's Omniverse platform to build digital simulations of its own production lines. Those simulations are the heart of physical AI. Before a robot lifts a part or a car merges into traffic, it rehearses inside a lifelike digital twin, repeating the task through reinforcement learning across millions of virtual trials until the behavior holds up in reality. The conversation reaches well beyond a single company. Analysts expect cooperation to broaden across LG affiliates, drawing in the EXAONE generative model from LG AI Research, the semiconductor substrates and sensing technology of LG Innotek, and the AI cloud business of LG Uplus. The visit also lands as Nvidia pushes into telecommunications, an arena some see as the connective tissue of physical AI. The chipmaker has been expanding an artificial intelligence—radio access network (AI-RAN) alliance with Nokia, a move expected to weigh on the choice of suppliers in Korea. "With Huang's visit, interest in AI-RAN is rising, as Nvidia focuses on expanding the business alongside data centers," said Kim Hong-sik, an analyst at Hana Securities. "The likely shape is a contest between a GPU-based Nvidia-Nokia camp and an Ericsson-Samsung approach built on CPUs with network solutions. More than market share, investors will watch how AI-RAN reshapes the equipment ecosystem, since it is likely to expand alongside the move to 5G standalone and 6G, completing the picture of physical AI." South Korea's other giants slot into the same logic. SK Group and Samsung Electronics supply the high-bandwidth memory that feeds AI accelerators and are building digital twins of their own chip lines, while Naver is converting a GPU supply deal into a deeper technology alliance. That last shift is telling. Naver Cloud said this week it would broaden its Nvidia relationship into a strategic alliance spanning AI infrastructure, models, services and physical AI, moving beyond a simple procurement arrangement. "Our partnership with Nvidia goes beyond a simple GPU supplier-and-customer relationship," Naver Cloud CEO Kim Yu-won said. "It is a strategic decision to develop AI technology together and expand the global AI ecosystem." Yet experts say Naver may be looking further ahead than simply becoming one of the country's top AI service providers. "Naver doesn't build physical robots, but its framework technology for orchestrating and operating fleets of robots is said to be quite advanced," said You. "Beyond AI data centers, there could well be talk of expanding into robot-framework services." Even the gaming meetings that frame the trip belong to this thread rather than to nostalgia. Game studios have spent two decades building convincing virtual worlds, exactly the synthetic environments now prized as training grounds for physical AI. Krafton this year launched Ludo Robotics, a humanoid venture, and has woven Nvidia's ACE character technology into its PUBG and inZOI titles. NC, long a gaming partner of Nvidia, now develops a "world model" through its NC AI unit that teaches robots the laws of physics. The esports stop fits too. Korea turned competitive gaming into a national spectacle from the StarCraft era onward, an appetite that drove demand for graphics hardware and helped seed the computing culture Nvidia rode to dominance, and whose data-rich virtual arenas echo the simulations AI now learns from. In the evening, Huang is set to share grilled pork belly and soju with corporate heads including SK, LG and Naver at a restaurant near Hongik University, a sequel to last year's "chimaek" gathering over chicken and beer. The menu invites easy comparison with that earlier dinner, where the agenda does not: the chicken-and-beer night sealed Korea's role as a supplier of chips and memory, today’s is meant to bind the country into the harder, more lucrative business of making machines that think and move. 2026-06-05 14:33:36
Krafton's Subnautica 2 unveils update roadmap shaped by player feedback SEOUL, June 05 (AJP) - Krafton's creative studio Unknown Worlds released its eighth developer vlog for "Subnautica 2," outlining short- and long-term update plans drawn from global player feedback after the underwater survival sequel's early-access launch on May 14. In the video, lead designer Anthony Gallegos detailed recent hotfix results and a roadmap that promises richer resource deposits and rebalanced predator attacks, changes aimed at sharpening the game's exploration and survival experience in response to community input. The studio said upcoming smaller updates will expand the Biomods adaptation system with additional passive slots and new early-game survival options, while proximity voice chat, emotes and character customization are in development for multiplayer. A larger content drop will open a new region inhabited by the towering Collector Leviathan and introduce fresh vehicles. "Player feedback and voices are the most important signpost showing the direction Subnautica 2 should take," said Fernando Melo, executive producer, adding that the studio would continue an open-development approach that places user opinion first. Developed by Unknown Worlds, founded by Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire, "Subnautica 2" is the direct successor to the genre-defining "Subnautica" series, built on Unreal Engine 5 and offering up to four-player co-op for the first time across Steam, the Epic Games Store and Xbox Series X|S. 2026-06-05 10:09:20
Samyang's Buldak tops 10 billion units, unveils new mascot Peppo SEOUL, June 05 (AJP) - South Korea's Samyang Foods announced that cumulative sales of its Buldak instant noodle brand had surpassed 10 billion units, a milestone the company is marking by rolling out a next-generation character, Peppo, to anchor an aggressive push into licensing and digital content. The fiery brand, which turns 14 this year, crossed the threshold at the end of May after generating about 7 trillion won ($4.54 billion) in cumulative revenue, the company said Friday. Buldak now sells in some 100 countries, churning out 2 billion units a year, or roughly 63 packets every second worldwide. Growth has accelerated sharply since the brand passed 1 billion units in 2017, hitting 4 billion in 2022 and 9 billion in 2025 before vaulting past 10 billion in barely half a year. Buoyed by the surge, Samyang became the first Korean food maker to top $900 million in exports last year and now accounts for more than 60 percent of the country's ramen shipments abroad. To capitalize on the momentum, Samyang is making Peppo, a chick hatched from an egg laid by predecessor mascot Hochi, the new face of the Buldak universe. Developed by affiliate Samyang Anni, the digital-native character has drawn 1.06 million subscribers on YouTube since its 2024 debut and has already featured on packaging for products such as Buldak Mac & Cheese in North America. "In the food industry a character usually serves as a tool to promote a product's flavor, but we questioned that formula and decided to raise ours as a global brand with a life of its own," said a Samyang Anni spokesperson. New domestic packaging featuring Peppo begins rolling out this month, starting with Buldak sauce, while branded merchandise and an official website are slated to follow, part of what Samyang calls its "eatertainment" vision first unveiled in 2023. 2026-06-05 09:42:08