SEOUL (Reuters) -OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman on Wednesday plans to meet with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, who seeks to boost Asia’s fourth-biggest economy through a policy of boosting investment in artificial intelligence, the presidential office has said.
The meeting will take place at the presidential office in center Seoul at 6 p.m. (0900 GMT), the office said.
OpenAI this year set up its first office in Seoul and appointed former Google official KyoungHoon Kim to lead the operation, as demand in the country jumps for its ChatGPT service.
South Korea has the largest number of paying ChatGPT subscribers after the United States, according to OpenAI.
During his visit to Seoul, Altman is also expected to meet with leaders of South Korea’s chipmakers – Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which make advanced memory chips used in AI data centers, media reports said.
At the White House in January, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the “Stargate” AI infrastructure project that would cost half a trillion dollars and be developed by OpenAI and its partners. including SoftBank and Oracle.
Nvidia said last week that it will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and supply it with data center chips.
Earlier this year, OpenAI said it would develop AI products for South Korea with South Korea’s dominant chat app operator Kakao.
(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin and Heekyong Yang; Editing by Leslie Adler)
