Journalist
Park Sae-jin박세진
swatchsjp@ajupress.com
Assistant EditorForeign embassies in Seoul & Geopolitics, Diplomacy, Policy
Experienced journalist and editor at AJU PRESS specializing in multilingual news. I cover international diplomacy, geolpolitics, and policy, consistently delivering highly accurate, compelling reporting for a worldwide audience.
"Reporting the facts. Shaping the narrative. Every second counts."
Latest by Park Sae-jin
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Korean firms strike $950 billion chip deals with US big tech SEOUL, July 25 (AJP) - South Korean companies and American technology giants will pursue semiconductor cooperation worth a combined $950 billion over the next five years, the presidential Blue House said Saturday, putting a price on the summit President Lee Jae Myung convened in San Francisco a day earlier. Kim Yong-beom, the presidential policy chief, gave the figure at a briefing at the press center in San Francisco, breaking down the results of the San Francisco AI Summit across the three pillars of the government's Three Mega Projects: semiconductors, AI data centers and physical AI. The total comes to about $950 billion (1,375 trillion won). The commitments are frameworks rather than signed orders. The Blue House said the announced scale covers memorandums of understanding and long-term cooperation plans, with actual investment and supply to follow as contracts are executed and projects proceed. Even so, the scale is difficult to overstate. Spread over five years, $950 billion works out to about $190 billion a year, close to the entire annual revenue of either Nvidia or Samsung Electronics, and the total nearly doubles the roughly $520 billion the two Korean chipmakers pledged in June toward new domestic fabrication plants. The largest single piece belongs to SK. The group will pursue long-term supply cooperation for advanced memory chips with Nvidia and other global technology companies worth $750 billion over five years, the Blue House said. That figure resolves a number that had hung over the summit since Friday, when Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang told Lee that a partnership with SK Group would reach $500 billion. No documentation followed his remark. The official tally now puts SK's memory cooperation half again higher, with Huang's figure apparently representing the Nvidia portion of a wider multi-buyer arrangement. Samsung Electronics signed a memorandum of understanding with Broadcom covering $200 billion over five years, spanning advanced memory supply and foundry cooperation to manufacture AI chips. The agreement pairs Samsung's contract chipmaking business with the company designing custom AI processors for several of the world's largest cloud operators. In data centers, Korean and global companies will pursue investment cooperation on roughly five gigawatts of AI data center capacity running about two million graphics processing units. For scale, the government had secured 260,000 advanced GPUs as of this spring, and its first-phase national plan targets eight gigawatts. SK Telecom agreed with Nvidia on support for building and expanding AI data centers of up to two gigawatts, with priority allocation of Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin systems, and will pursue investment in a gigawatt-class domestic AI data center project with Anthropic. Naver signed a strategic investment agreement with Nvidia and an infrastructure supply contract with the global investment firm Brookfield to build an AI factory complex worth a combined $10 billion. In physical AI, Hyundai Motor Group and Nvidia will jointly build what they call a robot reference platform, a standardized base for developing and validating AI robots that universities and startups can build on. The Blue House also said an autonomous vehicle foundry plan was announced with Waymo, without giving details. Samsung SDS signed a strategic partnership with Anthropic to jointly develop new AI markets and train AI engineers. The results land two days after Kim told foreign correspondents the figures companies were preparing could exceed the 4,700 trillion won ($3.2 billion) headline attached to the June investment package, and they close the loop the summit opened. Lee's San Francisco AI Declaration on Friday promised that South Korea would anchor the global AI supply chain while serving as the place where the technology is put to work first. Saturday's tally is the first accounting of what that pitch brought back. "This San Francisco AI Summit was a venue for combining South Korea's semiconductor competitiveness and its AI infrastructure, model and physical AI capabilities with the technology and capital of global big tech, to build an investment and cooperation ecosystem across the full AI stack," Kim said. "It carries meaning as the starting point of a global project that will lead the world's AI industry." 2026-07-25 15:20:25 -
Kookmin students take top prize at HUSS hackathon SEOUL, July 25 (AJP) - Kookmin University students helped win the top prize and two other awards at a national hackathon that asked humanities and social science students to solve social problems with artificial intelligence. The 2026 HUSS Convergence Camp Insight hackathon ran from July 1 to 3 at the Sono Calm resort in Gyeongju, backed by the Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation of Korea and organized by the council of the Humanities Utmost Sharing System (HUSS), a government program that trains humanities and social science students to work across disciplinary lines. About 430 students and program officials took part in the hackathon, with students from different universities and majors grouped into five-member joint teams to propose solutions to social problems. A total of 55 teams entered. Around 20 advanced through a written preliminary round to the final presentations, where 10 teams took prizes: one top prize carrying the award of the deputy prime minister and education minister, four excellence prizes from the National Research Foundation chairman, and five encouragement prizes from the HUSS council chair. Kookmin students stood on three of those teams, including the one that won it all. The top team, Onsaemiro, included Yang Seung-eon of Kookmin's Department of Political Science and International Relations and Lee Tae-ho of the Department of AI, Big Data and Management. The team proposed ORIGIN, a platform that screens AI-generated traditional culture content for distortion before it spreads. The service analyzes such content for likely historical and cultural errors, then runs it past heritage practitioners and experts before issuing certification. Yang researched distortion cases and the surrounding regulations, defined the problem and built the presentation. Lee tested the feasibility of the solution and shaped a business model aimed at government agencies and public institutions. Kim Yun-seo of the School of Management Information Systems joined the excellence prize team Daumi, which proposed Dahda, an AI-based indoor evacuation navigator for visually impaired people. The service uses Wi-Fi fingerprinting and Bluetooth beacon technology to guide users to the nearest emergency exit during a fire and relays their location inside the building to rescue teams, with voice and vibration guidance tailored to different types of disability. Kim designed and developed the application prototype and handled its interface design. Hyun Yun-su of the School of Management Information Systems and Choi So-yul of Kookmin University Business School (KIBS) joined the encouragement prize team Poporiner, which proposed Daol, a legal and administrative support service for migrant workers offering individual visa schedule management, administrative information and expert consultations in users' native languages. The two managed the team, planned the service and led the research behind its main functions. The results gave Kookmin students a hand in solutions spanning cultural content credibility, disaster safety and support for vulnerable groups, the mix of AI technique and humanities grounding the HUSS program was built to produce. The university's HUSS office said it would keep expanding hands-on education that turns that grounding toward real social problems, working through inter-university cooperation and global partnerships. 2026-07-25 14:59:36 -
UNESCO expands Korean tidal flats World Heritage listing SEOUL, July 25 (AJP) - The mudflats where the world's rarest sandpiper refuels twice a year got bigger on the map that matters most. The UNESCO World Heritage Committee on Saturday approved a major expansion of Getbol, Korean Tidal Flats, adding four coastal wetlands and bringing South Korea's only natural World Heritage property on the mainland to six components stretching along the country's southwestern and southern coasts, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. The decision, taken at the committee's 48th session in Busan, adds the tidal flats of Yeosu, Goheung and Muan in South Jeolla Province and Seosan in South Chungcheong Province to the property inscribed in 2021. It is a boundary modification rather than a new inscription, so South Korea's World Heritage count stays at 17. According to the announcement, issued jointly by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and the Korea Heritage Service, the committee found that the expanded property meets criterion (x), the natural heritage standard covering the most important habitats for conserving biological diversity, and cited its value to migratory waterbirds and marine life across the Yellow Sea ecosystem. The approval was expected. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the committee's advisory body on natural sites, recommended the expansion on June 5, and properties arriving with a positive recommendation are rarely turned back. The session itself is a first for South Korea, which has never hosted the committee since joining the World Heritage Convention in 1988. Getbol is the Korean word for tidal flats, the vast plains of mud and sand that the Yellow Sea's tides expose and drown twice daily. The sea's shallow basin and large tidal range have built some of the widest flats on Earth, fed by sediment from rivers on both the Korean and Chinese coasts. What looks like empty mud is among the most productive ecosystems known. UNESCO's records for the property count about 2,150 species, including 857 kinds of macrobenthos, the clams, crabs, worms and snails living in and on the sediment, along with mud octopuses, fiddler crabs and 47 invertebrate species found nowhere else. That buried abundance is what makes the flats matter far beyond South Korea. They sit at the waist of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, the migration corridor running from breeding grounds in Siberia and Alaska to wintering grounds as far south as Australia and New Zealand, used by an estimated 50 million waterbirds. For long-distance migrants, the Yellow Sea is the critical refueling stop in both directions, and the food packed into its mud is the fuel. The flyway is considered the most threatened of the world's major bird migration routes, largely because so much of the Yellow Sea coastline has been reclaimed for farmland, ports and industry over the past half century. The property provides habitat for 118 migratory bird species, among them eight globally threatened species found only on this flyway. The spoon-billed sandpiper, a bird small enough to sit in a palm with a bill flattened like a spatula, is the starkest case. It is critically endangered, with the wild population estimated in the hundreds, and it cannot complete its migration without the Yellow Sea flats. The endangered black-faced spoonbill, far eastern curlew, great knot and spotted greenshank depend on the same mud, as do the hooded crane, Saunders's gull and Chinese egret. The expansion also deepens a rare piece of cross-border conservation. China won World Heritage status for its own Yellow Sea coast in 2019, with the migratory bird sanctuaries along the Yellow Sea-Bohai Gulf, and the two listings now protect stopover habitat on both shores of the same sea, used by the same birds in the same weeks of the year. Saturday's result closes a condition attached to the original listing, and the history behind that condition is less tidy than the celebration suggests. When Getbol first came before the committee in 2021, IUCN recommended deferral, judging that the four nominated flats at Seocheon, Gochang, Shinan and Boseong-Suncheon did not cover enough of the habitat to justify inscription. South Korea overcame the recommendation on the committee floor. An amendment tabled by Kyrgyzstan drew the co-signatures of 13 of the 21 member states, and the property was inscribed by consensus, with MOFA describing the outcome at the time as the result of active diplomatic engagement with the World Heritage Centre and committee members. The inscription came with a recommendation to expand the property in a second phase. The government initially aimed higher than what was delivered on Saturday. When the 2021 listing was secured, the heritage authorities announced a Phase 2 plan covering nine additional sites, and the committee's own recommendation named candidates including Incheon, Hwaseong and Gunsan alongside the four that made it. The flats that dropped out along the way include some of the most ecologically prominent and the most contested. Ganghwa's flats near Incheon, a designated natural monument and the best-known breeding ground of the black-faced spoonbill, were left out of the nomination, as were the Incheon, Hwaseong and Gunsan flats, all of them under heavier reclamation and development pressure than the sites that went forward. Environmental groups made the gap explicit while the committee was sitting. On July 20, campaigners including the Incheon and Hwaseong branches of the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement held a press conference outside BEXCO, the Busan convention center hosting the session, calling for a third phase covering Incheon, Hwaseong, Gunsan and Busan. Their argument tracks the science: a flyway is a chain of stopovers, and protecting some links while leaving others exposed protects the birds only part of the way. IUCN's approval in June pointed in the same direction, recommending that South Korea continue analyzing additional flats with potential heritage value and keep building local community support, alongside sustaining traditional fishing and gathering practices and strengthening cooperation with other flyway countries. The Korea Heritage Service, led by administrator Heo Min, said the expansion was the joint work of MOFA, the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries under Minister Hwang Jong-woo, local governments and the Getbol World Heritage Promotion Team, and confirmed international recognition that the 2021 recommendations had been faithfully carried out. The service said it would continue working with the ministries, local governments and communities to preserve the property's value and build a base for sustainable use. The committee session in Busan runs through July 29. 2026-07-25 12:54:42 -
Nvidia puts SK partnership at $500 billion SEOUL, July 25 (AJP) - A partnership between SK Group and Nvidia will reach $500 billion, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said in San Francisco on Friday (local time), naming a sum larger than everything the chipmaker sold in its last full fiscal year. He said it in the future tense during a meeting with President Lee Jae Myung at a hotel downtown. The two companies would announce the partnership that day, he said, and the scale reached $500 billion (733 trillion won). As of Saturday morning in Seoul, no press release, regulatory filing, or statement from either company had put the figure on paper. The running blog Nvidia maintained through the summit carried a joint research lab with a Korean university and a note about a dinner in Woodside, California. It made no mention of $500 billion. The number is worth measuring against the company that named it. Nvidia reported revenue of $215.9 billion for the fiscal year that ended in January, a record, up 65 percent from the year before. The figure Huang attached to SK Group is more than twice that. It sits close to the roughly $520 billion Samsung Electronics and SK hynix jointly committed last month to new fabrication plants in southwestern South Korea, and it matches the headline value of Stargate, the data center program OpenAI announced last year. What the money covers, over what period, and whether it represents new business or a value placed on an arrangement that already exists were all left undisclosed. The last question is the live one. Nvidia and SK announced an expanded partnership in Seoul on June 8, and it was not small. SK hynix signed a multiyear technology agreement to co-develop memory for Nvidia's Vera Rubin AI supercomputers, Vera central processing units, RTX Spark personal computers and Jetson Thor robotics platforms. SK Telecom agreed to build a full-stack AI cloud on Nvidia's DSX platform, aimed at gigawatt-scale AI factories. SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won said at the time that cooperation with Nvidia, until then centered on memory supply, was being raised to the level of the whole group. Huang did not say on Friday whether the $500 billion is separate from that framework or a price now attached to it. Around the headline figure sat a list of commitments that reached across most of South Korean industry. SK hynix and Samsung Electronics would work with Nvidia on chip design and memory design, Huang said. Naver would receive a large investment, and he described the company as South Korea's leading cloud provider, saying the partnership would support its expansion at home and abroad. With Hyundai Motor Group, Nvidia would jointly develop a self-driving Genesis vehicle and work on robotics. With LG, he said, the two companies are developing power generation systems for use in factories and in homes. Two of the announcements concern where the research happens rather than what gets built. Nvidia is starting what Huang called an AI frontier lab in South Korea, and he said leading company researchers plan to relocate from California to work there. Nvidia and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced a joint AI research lab on Friday at the Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI on the university's Seoul campus, a $300 million commitment over an initial five years that includes $50 million a year in computing resources, funding for at least 10 researchers annually and internships for each of them. Nvidia describes it as the first joint AI lab between a Korean university and any global technology company. Aju Press reported the terms on Friday. Huang tied that work to something larger. Nvidia is cooperating with KAIST to build what he called Korea AI, he said, and plans to develop a Korean large language model in South Korea, for South Koreans. Partnerships now run from conglomerates to startups to research organizations, he added, and span AI chips, physical AI and infrastructure. Physical AI is the government's term for machines that carry the technology off the screen, robots and vehicles and factory equipment that sense their surroundings and act on them. It is one of the three pillars of the investment package Lee announced on June 29, alongside semiconductors and AI data centers. Blue House policy chief Kim Yong-beom told reporters on Thursday that more than half of the roughly eight gigawatts of first-phase AI data center capacity the government has planned is expected to take firm shape during the two-day visit. He declined to give values ahead of company announcements, and said the presidential trip had acted as a catalyst, helping close negotiations between South Korean and American companies that had run on for months. Lee used the meeting to press for more. South Korea intends to become the country that leads the world on artificial intelligence and on putting AI to actual use, he said, asking Nvidia to take an active role. The government spent the past year preparing before launching the Three Mega Projects, he added, and is now building a society and a state with AI at the center. The exchange was friendly. Lee told Huang he had watched broadcasts of the Nvidia chief eating fried chicken and drinking beer in Seoul more than once and had been sorry to miss it. Huang said the energy he felt in South Korea, from fried chicken through to grilled pork belly, had been remarkable, and credited Lee's stated goal of building an AI native nation with giving the country momentum. Lee picked up a phrase Huang had used and returned it. Calling this an AI golden age is exactly right, he said, and the country is now entering the beginning of it. "Under the president's leadership, Korea has achieved a great deal over the past year," Huang said. "It would not be an exaggeration to call this truly South Korea's golden age." 2026-07-25 11:44:11 -
President Lee pitches South Korea as AI testbed SEOUL, July 25 (AJP) - The country that makes most of the world's memory chips now wants to be the first country to put artificial intelligence to work everywhere else. President Lee Jae Myung carried that argument to San Francisco on Friday, delivering what his office named the San Francisco AI Declaration to a room holding the chief executives of Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and Broadcom. The declaration made two promises at once. South Korea would keep AI chips moving to global buyers under any conditions, and it would open its own factories, cities and public offices as the ground where the technology gets proven in use. The first promise rests on market position. Samsung Electronics and SK hynix together account for roughly 80 percent of global sales of high-bandwidth memory, the chips stacked alongside the graphics processors that run large AI models, according to the Korea Economic Institute of America. The second rests on a domestic program that has no clear equivalent anywhere else. Both trace back to the package the government calls the Three Mega Projects, announced on June 29 at the presidential Blue House, the presidential office in Seoul, when Samsung and SK Group committed a combined 4,755 trillion won ($3.2 trillion) to semiconductors, AI data centers and physical AI, the government's term for robots and other machines that carry the technology off the screen. Adding pledges from GS, Naver and others, the Blue House put the total near 5,000 trillion won. "South Korea will rise as an irreplaceable core country in the global AI supply chain," Lee said in his address. He grounded that in memory manufacturing, saying the country would serve as a trusted production base for AI chips and as a supply chain partner, and pointed to a shift already underway from a single cluster near Seoul toward production sites spread across the provinces. Then he moved to the part other governments cannot easily copy. South Korea would become a global AI testbed and production platform, he said, a place where the technology runs not only in laboratories and on screens but on factory floors, inside cities and across logistics networks. He asked the executives in front of him to choose the country as the stage where their technologies and ideas turn into working products fastest. That claim leans on a program Lee has pushed since taking office in June 2025, which his government calls an AI Basic Society. The premise is that access to AI belongs closer to a public utility than to a consumer product. Lee put it plainly at the Blue House in December, telling SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son that AI should become basic infrastructure the way water, sewerage and roads are, available to every citizen, company and organization at least at a working level. The legislative piece arrived on January 22, when South Korea's framework act on the development of AI took effect after a one-year grace period. It pairs rules for higher-risk applications with state support for adoption. The European Union legislated first but has delayed its high-risk provisions, which leaves South Korea as the first country actually applying a comprehensive AI law in full. Lee cited it from the stage. "South Korea will build a society where no citizen is left behind even in the AI era," he said. "We call this an AI Basic Society." The programs underneath are specific and close at hand. Bae Kyung-hoon, deputy prime minister and minister of science and information and communication technology, told a ministry briefing at the Blue House on July 16 that a free AI service for the entire population, branded AI for All, would launch in December. He said at the same session that South Korea was capable of building a model in the class of Mythos, the frontier system from Anthropic, whose chief executive sat in the San Francisco audience eight days later. Kim Yong-beom, the policy chief at the Blue House, sharpened the argument on July 21. Access to AI should now be treated as a basic right, he said, and the state should hand citizens a domestically built system at no cost, both to pull users away from foreign services and to accumulate the demand and data a home market needs to grow on its own. He drew a line between that and cash welfare. Guaranteeing everyone a minimum amount of computing, in his framing, adds to what a person can produce rather than to what they can spend. A second program would place an AI agent inside public administration, identifying the benefits and permits a citizen qualifies for and filing the applications on their behalf. Kim argued that the state absorbing the risk of first adoption is what opens the larger market, since AI has still not moved into the places where people currently exercise judgment and carry responsibility, among them hospital consulting rooms, classrooms and government offices. Money and hardware have followed. The government tripled AI spending this year to 10.1 trillion won from 3.3 trillion. It has secured 260,000 advanced graphics processors, helped by a priority supply commitment Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang made at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Gyeongju last October. A presidential committee on national AI strategy, chaired by Lee, launched in September 2025 with a contribution to a global AI Basic Society written in as one of three policy pillars. The gap that remains is wide. Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI , in an index published in April, counted five notable AI models from South Korea, third in the world but far behind 50 from the United States and 30 from China. The same report ranked South Korea first for AI patents per 100,000 people for a second consecutive year, a pattern that fits a country better at applying technology than at inventing the frontier version of it. Lee's pitch in San Francisco was, in effect, that the first skill is worth buying. The response from the room was warm. Altman had met Lee at a hotel in downtown San Francisco earlier on Friday, where Lee asked him to take a larger role in the Three Mega Projects. Altman told him the effort the South Korean government was making on AI placed the country among the most important in the world, and said he hoped leaders elsewhere would follow Lee's example on investment and policy. Wide access to enough high-quality AI mattered greatly, he added, and he pointed to the Korean projects as the kind of program that delivers it. Lee had opened that meeting by telling Altman that South Koreans were pleased and hopeful he had taken an interest and decided to invest while the country reorganizes its industries around AI. Smiling, he added that he had been making good use of ChatGPT. Concrete numbers were promised but not disclosed. Kim said on Friday that the summit would produce confirmed customers for large-scale AI data center construction, and that Samsung Electronics and SK hynix had each agreed new long-term supply contracts for specified chips. At a briefing for foreign correspondents the previous day, he said the figures the companies were preparing to announce could exceed the June headline. That headline deserves reading closely. Of Samsung's 2,655 trillion won, 2,030 trillion is committed to the existing Pyeongtaek and Yongin clusters, leaving 625 trillion for the new sites in the Honam, Chungcheong and Yeongnam regions. The government has said investment outside the capital region comes to about 1,600 trillion won. The totals bundle new commitments together with capital plans the companies had already set, and both depend on power and water arriving on schedule at sites where neither is guaranteed. The government-backed summit was held at the Midway, an arts and events venue in San Francisco, and drew about 150 people, including researchers, investors and startup founders. Samsung Electronics executive chairman Lee Jae-yong, SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won, Hyundai Motor Group executive chair Chung Eui-sun and Naver co-founder and board chair Lee Hae-jin attended alongside Huang, Altman, Amodei and Broadcom president and chief executive Hock Tan. Lee put the combined corporate value of the companies represented at more than 20,000 trillion won, about $13.6 trillion. San Francisco is the first stop on an 11-day trip that continues to Brazil, Chile and Argentina before a stopover in Frankfurt. In his closing remarks, Lee reached for a larger frame. AI , he said, is like a new fire that humanity has discovered, and responding to what cannot be avoided is something South Korea has proved good at. The country is not yet 100 years past colonial rule and started again from the total destruction of war, he noted, reaching industrialization and then democracy in a short span. He then tied the economic argument to South Korean politics. Economic questions and democracy run together, he said, because both demand that things be rational, transparent, fair and predictable. He cited what he called the turmoil of about two years ago as proof of the country's democratic capacity, a reference to the martial law declaration of December 2024 and the impeachment that followed. "Until now, South Korea has been chasing the advanced countries," Lee said. "Now we intend to stand a step ahead and take the path of becoming a model for everyone." He asked the global companies in the room to work with the country at the threshold of what he called the AI golden age. "I dare say you will never be disappointed." 2026-07-25 10:55:14 -
Kazakhstan plans TV debates for Kurultay elections SEOUL, July 24 (AJP) - Kazakhstan will broadcast televised debates between political parties nationwide ahead of the August 23 elections to the Kurultay, the country's new single-chamber parliament, as the Central Asian nation prepares for its first vote under a constitution adopted this spring. The plan was announced at a meeting of the Central Election Commission, Kazakhstan's state-run news agency Qazinform reported Friday. Lyazzat Suyindik, a member of the Central Election Commission (CEC), said media outlets are entitled to host such events as long as they comply with electoral law, and that discussions are underway to stage inter-party debates on the 24KZ channel. Three more broadcasters, Jibek Joly, Qazaqstan, and Channel 7, have applied to carry the debates. Suyindik said media and online platforms must publish their rates and conditions for carrying paid campaign material by July 18, five days before official campaigning begins, and submit the information to the CEC. Parties fielding candidate lists may pay for their appearances in televised programs, including the debates, from their electoral funds. The election will be a milestone in the most sweeping overhaul of Kazakhstan's political system since independence in 1991. Voters will fill all 145 seats of the Kurultay, a unicameral legislature that replaces the two-chamber parliament of the Mazhilis and the Senate. Deputies will serve five-year terms and be elected entirely through nationwide party lists. The Kurultay was created by a new constitution that Kazakhstanis approved in a referendum on March 15, with nearly 90 percent voting in favor on a turnout of 73 percent, the highest for any national vote since 2019. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed the constitution into force two days later, and it took effect on July 1. The document rewrote roughly 84 percent of the 1995 constitution, abolishing the Senate, restoring the office of vice president for the first time since 1996, and establishing the Halyk Kenesi, or People's Council, a presidentially appointed consultative body with the right to propose legislation. The constitutional rewrite is the latest stage in a reform drive Tokayev has pursued since deadly unrest shook the country in January 2022. That year he pushed through constitutional amendments limiting presidents to a single seven-year term, and in 2023 he called early elections to the Mazhilis under a restored mixed electoral system. In September 2025 he went further, declaring it was time to part with what he called the super-presidential form of government, and proposed the transition to a unicameral parliament. The referendum, originally floated for 2027, was moved up to March this year. The government presents the changes as democratic modernization that streamlines lawmaking and strengthens parliamentary oversight, and the new charter grants the Kurultay meaningful powers, including overriding presidential vetoes, initiating referendums, consenting to key appointments, and expressing no confidence in the government. Some analysts abroad have questioned how far the reforms shift the balance away from the presidency, noting that presidential bills could receive priority treatment in the new chamber. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which observed the March referendum, is due to field an observation mission for the August vote, and its assessment will be an early test of how the new system is received internationally. Public interest in the election appears high. A telephone survey by the Kazakhstan Institute of Public Development found that 70.3 percent of citizens plan to vote in the Kurultay elections, Qazinform reported. 2026-07-24 15:23:52 -
Kookmin University students win AI self-driving hackathon SEOUL, July 24 (AJP) - Undergraduates programmed scale-model cars to judge forks in the road and dodge moving obstacles by describing what they wanted in plain language and letting generative AI write the code, at a three-day autonomous driving hackathon that ended with Kookmin University teams sweeping the top three prizes. The 2026 SEA:ME Hackathon drew 117 undergraduates in 27 teams from seven universities nationwide to Park Habio in Seoul's Songpa district from July 14 to 16, Kookmin University said Friday. The university's SMT team took the grand prize for stable driving performance and a polished algorithm, with fellow Kookmin teams SKY and KUUVe claiming the top excellence prize and the gold prize. Teams from Keimyung University, Chungbuk National University, and Sunmoon University took silver, bronze, technology, and design awards. Now in its fourth year, the competition is jointly organized by the future automobile project group at Kookmin University's Convergence and Open Sharing System (COSS) and the intelligent robotics project group at Hanyang University ERICA, with backing from the Volkswagen Group WE: Foundation, a nonprofit funded by Volkswagen Group Korea and its four brands, Volkswagen, Audi, Lamborghini, and Bentley. SEA:ME, short for Software Engineering in Automotive and Mobility Ecosystems, is the foundation's flagship program for training automotive software talent. This year's contest ran under the theme of an AI-native scale-car autonomous driving challenge, built to let students experience how mobility software is developed when AI sits at the center of the process. Telechips, a leading South Korean fabless chip designer, joined as technology partner and supplied scale cars built on its high-performance TOPST single-board computer platform. Each participant also received access to Claude Code Max 20x, a generative AI tool specialized for coding. Students worked in the style known as vibe coding, issuing instructions in natural language and letting the AI generate the code, then refining the results. Their missions simulated demanding urban driving conditions, including deciding which way to go at forks and avoiding obstacles that moved. "Every team practiced on the track late into the night," members of the winning SMT team said. "We learned a great deal turning ideas into working results with AI, and it was a valuable experience." Shin Sung-hwan, who heads Kookmin University's future automobile project group, said the event lifted students' mobility software skills a full step in a short time, and thanked the foundation, Telechips, and the faculty and staff who ran the competition. Kim Jong-chan, deputy head of the project group and the hackathon's director, said this year's event was designed around two ideas, applying AI-native development methods and using domestically produced automotive semiconductors. "It was a valuable opportunity for students to tackle the kind of advanced autonomous driving problems that carmakers are actually wrestling with," he said. The hackathon adds to a strong year for the SEA:ME program. A South Korean university coalition team trained through the program won the Bosch Future Mobility Challenge 2026, an international autonomous driving and connectivity competition held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in May, beating 57 teams from around the world. Kookmin University, marking its 80th anniversary this year, has designated mobility as one of eight specialization fields under its long-term development strategy, KMU VISION 2035: EDGE, and says it will continue expanding industry partnerships with automakers at home and abroad. 2026-07-24 15:00:26 -
KAIST, NVIDIA open joint lab to build AI for Korean industry SEOUL, July 24 (AJP) - NVIDIA will pour $300 million into a joint research laboratory with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology to develop artificial intelligence built specifically for the Korean language and South Korea's industries, in one of the largest corporate commitments to AI research at a Korean university. The NVIDIA-KAIST Joint AI Research Lab will be housed at the Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI on the Seoul campus of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the university said Friday. The collaboration runs for an initial five years and includes AI computing resources worth $50 million a year, supplied through NVIDIA's cloud partners in South Korea. KAIST's announcement on Friday came as NVIDIA moves to finalize a separate joint research lab with Seoul National University, a sign that the world's dominant AI chipmaker is anchoring its Asian research strategy in South Korea's two leading research universities at once. The KAIST lab will focus on agentic AI, systems that go beyond answering questions to planning and carrying out multi-step tasks on their own, such as analyzing information, selecting tools, and executing work with little human supervision. Researchers will build agentic models and agent systems tuned to the Korean language and to domestic industries including manufacturing, semiconductors, biotechnology, and services. The work will draw on NVIDIA's full-stack AI technology, the company's integrated platform spanning chips, computing systems, software, and models, along with Nemotron, a family of open AI models NVIDIA has released for companies and research institutions to adapt freely. The lab plans to use Nemotron as a base for models with stronger Korean-language capability. Beyond infrastructure, the partnership targets talent. The lab will fund at least 10 KAIST researchers each year and provide each of them with an internship at NVIDIA. The company also plans to hire top Korean AI researchers into full-time research positions, linking funding, internships, and permanent jobs into a single pipeline intended to keep ambitious researchers building careers in South Korea. "Korea is home to world-class AI researchers and one of the most advanced technology ecosystems in the world," said Bill Dally, NVIDIA's chief scientist and senior vice president of research. "The NVIDIA-KAIST joint lab will accelerate the development of AI models and agent systems for Korea's industries, language, and future, and serve as a foundation for pioneering next-generation AI research." Kim Hyun-woo, an NVIDIA researcher who joins the Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI as an assistant professor next month, will direct the lab, setting its research agenda and coordinating joint work between KAIST teams and NVIDIA's global research organization. Kim, currently a postdoctoral researcher at NVIDIA working with AI researcher Yejin Choi and NVIDIA vice president Jan Kautz, won the Outstanding Paper Award at the EMNLP 2023 natural language processing conference for research on knowledge distillation, a technique for transferring capabilities between AI models. He recently released Nemotron-Personas-Korea, the first large-scale Korean persona dataset, which topped Hugging Face's trending dataset rankings for 10 days. KAIST president Bae Choong-sik called the partnership "the starting point of a strategic partnership combining world-class AI research capability with cutting-edge AI infrastructure," and said the university would build "a global AI research hub representing the Republic of Korea." Research topics will include large AI models optimized for Korean, industry-specific models, next-generation AI with reasoning and planning capability, and cooperation and verification among multiple AI agents. Both sides said they intend research results to flow into companies, public institutions, and national AI systems rather than remain academic. The two organizations are still finalizing details of research selection, researcher support, and infrastructure provision, and said the lab's start date and operating plan will be announced once negotiations conclude. The lab at Seoul National University (SNU) is taking shape on a separate track. The university and NVIDIA plan to sign a memorandum of understanding this month covering joint research in physical AI and AI semiconductors, Aju Press has learned, with 10 to 20 research teams to be selected for an initial term of about three years. The plan includes NVIDIA internships for top students, a dedicated collaboration space on campus for visiting NVIDIA researchers, and jointly developed curricula, with SNU courses to be shared worldwide through NVIDIA's Deep Learning Institute education platform. A joint steering committee and a symposium in September are expected to follow the signing. The agreement follows months of contact between the two sides, capped by Jensen Huang's visit to the university in June, when the NVIDIA chief executive toured its AI research center and robotics lab and met with students. NVIDIA has run joint research labs with major universities in Singapore and Hong Kong. The Seoul push is widely seen in the industry as an effort to make South Korea a core Asian research base, secure AI talent, and counterbalance China's AI industry. 2026-07-24 14:47:09 -
Asia's Gen Z do not wait for permission anymore SEOUL, July 24 (AJP) - A canceled exam in New Delhi. A social media ban in Kathmandu. A housing allowance in Jakarta. A job quota in Dhaka. None of these, on its own, reads like the beginning of a national crisis. Yet each one sent hundreds of thousands of young people into the streets, and in two of those countries the government did not survive. Something has shifted in how Asia's youngest adults deal with power. The region's leaders are finding out the hard way. The latest lesson is unfolding in India. For more than three weeks, students have held a protest site near Parliament in New Delhi, and smaller demonstrations have spread to Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and dozens of other cities. The spark was the leak of a national medical school entrance exam in May, which forced millions of students to retake their tests. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, now in his 13th year in office, waited until this week to respond, posting on social media that nothing matters more than the welfare of the youth and promising fast-track tribunals for the leakers. Protesters called it late and lame. Their demands widened the next day. Why does an exam leak shake a government? Look underneath it. India's economy is growing at a healthy pace on paper. Still, nearly 40 percent of young degree holders are unemployed, according to the State of Working India 2026 report from Azim Premji University. Families pour savings and debt into an education system that routinely fails to prepare graduates for work. Then the one gateway that promised fairness, the entrance exam, turns out to be crooked too. The same sequence has been playing out across the region for four years. In Bangladesh in June, 2024, students protested a quota system that reserved a large share of government jobs for descendants of independence war veterans. In a country where a stable public sector job is one of the few reliable paths to a middle-class life, the quota felt like a rigged game. Then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina dismissed the protesters with a slur, her security forces opened fire, and the movement stopped being about quotas at all. More than 1,000 people died, according to the interim government's health ministry. In August, Hasina fled to India by helicopter, ending 15 years in power. Nepal came next, in September 2025. The government of K.P. Sharma Oli banned 26 social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube and X, citing registration rules. Young Nepalis read it as censorship, and the tinder was already dry. Videos contrasting the luxury vacations of politicians' children with the grinding poverty of ordinary families had gone viral under hashtags mocking the "nepo kids" of the elite. Within days, parliament was burning and at least 19 protesters were dead. Oli resigned. The ban itself was lifted almost immediately, and it changed nothing. The ban was never the story either. In Indonesia, the fuse was a report in August 2025 that all 580 members of parliament were collecting a monthly housing allowance of about $3,000, roughly 10 times the minimum wage in Jakarta. Protests turned into riots after a police armored vehicle ran over and killed Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old motorcycle delivery driver who was not even demonstrating. He was trying to complete a food order. In a country where the gig economy has become the holding pen for millions of young people the formal economy cannot absorb, his death needed no explanation. President Prabowo Subianto revoked the perks within days. At least eight people had died by then. Sri Lanka started it all in 2022, when an economic collapse sent young protesters into the presidential palace, some swimming in its pool, and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country. What makes this wave remarkable is where it is happening. These are societies where age confers authority, where enduring hardship quietly is treated as a virtue, where the young have long been told their turn would come if they studied and waited. Protest itself is nothing new in Asia. Students drove South Korea's democratization in 1987 and filled Indian streets long before independence. But even those movements had structure the state could recognize. Umbrella coalitions, dissident elders, opposition politicians ready to carry street demands to the negotiating table. The new thing is a generation that skips all of it, organizing itself, naming its own enemies, and bringing down governments run by men twice and three times its age. The waiting is over. Governments keep misreading these movements, and the errors follow a pattern of their own. Leaders respond to the trigger. They cancel the ban, revoke the allowance, promise tribunals for the exam leakers. Each time the concession lands as an insult, because the protesters were never asking for the small thing. They were asking why an entire generation did what it was told, studied harder than any cohort before it, and arrived at adulthood to find the jobs missing, the exams rigged, and the officials' children shopping in Paris. No tribunal answers that. The next instinct is to look for someone to arrest, buy off, or sit across a table from. There is no one. India's protests are fronted by the Cockroach Janta Party, which is not a party at all but a satirical movement named after an insult delivered by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Nepal's protesters organized on Discord, a gaming chat app. Indonesian demonstrators flew a pirate flag from a Japanese comic. To men who came up through party machines, this all looks unserious, and that is exactly the miscalculation. A movement with no head cannot be decapitated. The old strongman playbook was written against opposition parties and union bosses. It has no page for a hashtag. What remains is force, and force is the fastest way to lose. Hasina's men fired on students, and she lost the country. Nepal's crackdown killed 19, and the government fell within five days. In India, the batons and tear gas deployed on Monday turned a protest about exam accountability into something much larger. Watching from Seoul, it is tempting to treat all this as someone else's weather. South Korea's young people do not burn parliaments. But the underlying inventory should sound familiar. Brutal exam competition. Credential inflation. Youth unemployment concentrated among the educated. Housing priced out of reach. A raw, almost forensic sensitivity to fairness. The fury that followed South Korea's own hiring scandals struck the same nerve. Korean youth have so far channeled that anger through ballots and online mobilization rather than street occupations, and they have swung elections doing it. The difference between Seoul and Dhaka is not the grievance. It is whether institutions still offer a believable way out. That is the real warning in this wave. The Gen Z across Asia are not more radical than the generations before them. It is less patient with theater, and it no longer accepts a system's promises as payment. These young people watched their parents defer, and they watched deference go unrewarded. 2026-07-24 14:02:33 -
US ambassador to Korea Steel will arrive in Seoul next week SEOUL, July 24 (AJP) - The new United States ambassador to South Korea will arrive in Seoul next week, ending a vacancy of about 18 months at the top of the American mission and putting a confirmed envoy on the ground just as the two governments try to turn a sweeping trade and investment deal into actual projects. Michelle Steel gave the timing Thursday (local time) in response to a question from Yonhap News Agency at the opening of the Korea-U.S. Shipbuilding Partnership Center in Washington. "Next week," she said, referring other questions to the State Department. She called the work of strengthening the Seoul-Washington alliance her "top priority." Yonhap reported that she is widely expected to fly out around Wednesday. The post has had no confirmed occupant since Philip Goldberg left in January 2025, one of the longest gaps in the modern history of the embassy. James Heller has run the mission as chargé d'affaires ad interim, the title given to the senior diplomat who holds an embassy together when no ambassador is in place. A chargé can manage the building and pass messages. What a chargé cannot do is speak with the authority of a presidential appointee, and that distinction has mattered over the past year and a half. It has mattered because almost everything of consequence between the two countries has been decided somewhere else. The tariff and investment package that now defines the relationship was negotiated by cabinet ministers flying back and forth, instead of the embassy in Seoul. U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday signed a memorandum directing the U.S. Trade Representative to impose tariffs of 10 percent to 12.5 percent on imports from 60 trading partners, including South Korea, following Section 301 investigations into whether they failed to prohibit or effectively enforce bans on imports made with forced labor. Rather than imposing a flat 12.5 percent tariff on Korean goods, however, the White House created a separate category for South Korea, Japan and Switzerland. Under the presidential memorandum, products from South Korea whose existing most-favored-nation (MFN) tariff is below 12.5 percent will be subject to an additional Section 301 duty sufficient to raise the total tariff to 12.5 percent. Products already facing MFN duties of 12.5 percent or higher will pay no additional Section 301 tariff. The White House said capping the total duty at 12.5 percent was "feasible, consistent with the terms of the Agreements on Reciprocal Trade or similar arrangements," and was intended to encourage Korea and the other economies to fulfill commitments on forced-labor import prohibitions. Steel arrives into that. She is 70, born in Seoul in 1955, and moved to the U.S. with her family in 1975. She speaks Korean. Her career before Congress was built on tax and local government in California, first on the California State Board of Equalization, which administers state taxes, and then on the Orange County Board of Supervisors, where she served as chair. She won a House seat in 2020, held it in 2022, and lost it narrowly to Democrat Derek Tran in 2024. Her husband, Shawn Steel, has been the Republican national committeeman for California since 2008 and led the state party from 2001 to 2003. That background points in a clear direction. Steel is a Republican operator with a business and tax orientation and a long-standing personal network in the Korean-American community, not a career Foreign Service officer. Trump nominated her in April, and the Senate confirmed her on June 17 by 55 votes to 39, close to a party-line result. During her time in the House, she pushed the Korean American Divided Families National Registry Act, which sought to help Korean Americans trace relatives separated in North Korea since the 1950~53 Korean War, and she served on Trump's advisory commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders during his first term. Her confirmation hearing on May 20 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee showed what she is likely to press on. Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee told her American technology firms and the e-commerce company Coupang appeared to be treated unfairly in South Korea and asked her to make sure that stopped. Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska raised trade barriers on American farm goods and cut quotas for American soybeans. Steel said she would take those cases to Seoul officials directly. The venue for her remarks on Thursday fit the same pattern. The Korea-U.S. Shipbuilding Partnership Center (KUSPC) is funded and staffed by Seoul and sits in Washington as the working base for the shipbuilding side of the package, known in both capitals by the slogan MASGA, or Make American Shipbuilding Great Again. It came out of a memorandum signed on May 8 between South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources and the U.S. Department of Commerce. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick attended Thursday's opening alongside Kim and executives from HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering, Samsung Heavy Industries and Hanwha Ocean, which bought the Philly Shipyard in Philadelphia in December 2024 and has committed $5 billion to expanding it. Steel will be the second Korean American to hold the Seoul post, after Sung Kim, who served from 2011 to 2014, and the second woman, after Kathleen Stephens, who served from 2008 to 2011. What she told the Senate in May was blunt. "American companies operating in Korea deserve the same market access that Korean companies enjoy in the U.S.," she said. 2026-07-24 08:11:25