At an artificial intelligence (AI) summit held in San Francisco on the 24th by President Lee Jae-myung, who is on a consecutive tour of the United States, South America (Brazil, Chile, Argentina) and Germany, a symbolic scene unfolded as not only Korea's leading AI chip companies but also global Big Tech firms gathered in one place.
Competitors in the AI supremacy race came together, including OpenAI and Anthropic, which face off with ChatGPT and Claude in the generative AI market; Nvidia and Broadcom, the two pillars of the AI chip market; and Silicon Valley venture investment rivals Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Sequoia Capital.
Observers say the scene of all of them taking the same stage, centered on President Lee, was a symbolic moment that encapsulated the status of Korea's AI sector and the expectations global Big Tech places on Korea.
Sam Altman vs. Dario Amodei: 'Once a Rival, Always a Rival'
The most eye-catching figures were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Amodei joined OpenAI in 2016 and worked as a core researcher leading GPT development, building the company alongside Altman. He then left the company in 2021 amid growing differences over how quickly to commercialize AI and how much safety to secure before release, and founded Anthropic the following year. Since then, OpenAI with ChatGPT and Anthropic with Claude have become the fiercest competitors vying for supremacy in the generative AI market.
The tension between the two often draws attention at official events. At an AI summit held in New Delhi, India, earlier this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi suggested that participants hold hands for a commemorative photo, but Altman and Amodei were captured raising only their own fists without holding each other's hands.
Hong Kong's South China Morning Post (SCMP) described this as "Once a rival, always a rival." The two later explained that the event's flow had merely been chaotic and there was no intent, but in the AI industry, the scene is remembered as symbolically showing the rivalry between the two. This time, at the San Francisco AI summit hosted by President Lee, the two took the same stage and spoke in unison about Korea's role as a core player in AI.
AI Icon Jensen Huang vs. Post-Nvidia Hock Tan; Samsung Teams With Broadcom, SK With Nvidia
Also in attendance were Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, the two pillars of the AI chip market. Unlike Nvidia, which symbolizes the AI era, Broadcom is the central company in the "post-Nvidia" strategy. Nvidia, the absolute leader in general-purpose GPUs, and Broadcom, which leads the custom AI chip (ASIC) market, are the companies competing most fiercely over dominance of AI infrastructure. Of course, some assess that their competition is less adversarial and closer to strategic competition to secure the same customers in different ways.
The fact that the SK Group and Samsung Electronics each chose different partners after this summit also reflects this trend as it is. The SK Group decided to pursue a total of $750 billion in advanced memory supply cooperation over the next five years, including $500 billion in cooperation with Nvidia, while Samsung Electronics embarked on $200 billion in AI chip and foundry cooperation with Broadcom. While targeting the same AI chip market, SK placed its weight on Nvidia's GPU-centered ecosystem, and Samsung on the ASIC ecosystem led by Broadcom.
Broadcom Confronting Nvidia's GPU Ecosystem
In fact, Broadcom is a company that helps Big Tech firms developing AI models design chips optimized for their own services. Behind the trend of Google's TPU, Meta and OpenAI pursuing their own AI chips lies Broadcom's design capability, some say. Integrated design capability that spans not only chip design but also packaging, power and thermal management, high-bandwidth memory (HBM) integration and foundry production optimization is an area achievable only with decades of accumulated technology. For this reason, Broadcom is called the "designer of custom chips" in the AI era and is regarded as the most powerful alternative confronting Nvidia's GPU-centered ecosystem.
Ultimately, this cooperation does not stop at simply increasing the scale of contracts; it can be read as a parallel strategy in which SK builds competitiveness in Nvidia's AI computing ecosystem and Samsung in the custom AI chip ecosystem together with Broadcom. The significance of this San Francisco AI summit is all the more special in that Korea has joined hands with both of the two pillars of AI.
Rivals Gather in the Venture Capital Field Too
The "gathering of rivals" continued at the Silicon Valley venture investment meetup held on the 26th, the second day of the tour. Among the six venture capital (VC) firms that entered into cooperation with the National Pension Service, the ones that drew particular attention were Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Sequoia Capital.
While Sequoia reigned for decades as a traditional powerhouse of Silicon Valley venture investment by investing in Apple, Google and Nvidia, a16z, launched in 2009, challenged the existing order with large-scale funds and an aggressive startup support strategy. In other words, the two companies are known as the old and new powerhouses of the Silicon Valley VC industry, competing over promising startups and AI investment opportunities.
Andreessen Horowitz vs. Sequoia Capital... Old and New Powerhouses of Silicon Valley VC
The two companies attended the event hosted by President Lee together with General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The combined assets under management of these six firms reach approximately $300 billion. It is significant that the world's top VCs, in competition with one another, sat at one table over the single agenda of investment in Korean startups.
Behind this "sitting with the enemy," some assess that the network of the Blue House's science and technology advisers, who know the Silicon Valley ecosystem well, was at work. According to Blue House officials, local academic and industrial connections formed over a long time through channels such as Stanford University played no small role in contacting global VCs and composing the list of participants.
In fact, a16z partner Martin Casado, born in 1976, and Sequoia Capital partner Alfred Lin, born in 1972, majored in computer science and statistics respectively at Stanford. The Blue House served as the connecting link in the rivalry between the two, promising investment in Korean startups in one place.
In this way, the San Francisco AI summit and the Silicon Valley venture investment meetup drew a total of $950 billion (about 1,375 trillion won) in AI and semiconductor cooperation between domestic companies and global Big Tech, and as six of Silicon Valley's representative venture capital (VC) firms embarked on strategic cooperation with the National Pension Service, the foundation for domestic AI startups to attract overseas investment was also strengthened.
Above all, the resilience of K-AI, which was able to gather the biggest rivals in one place to produce such results. It appears set to become a representative symbol of, literally, the "K-Initiative."
