Global artificial intelligence companies including Nvidia, OpenAI and Alibaba are stepping up efforts to win over South Korean startups, aiming to expand their ecosystems by getting young firms to build on their AI chips and models.
Alibaba recently held a "Qwen Meetup Seoul" event in Seoul's Gangnam district, meeting with startup developers, according to industry sources on the 26th. Edwin Tack, a solutions architect at Alibaba Cloud Korea, attended the event and explained how to optimize vibe coding costs using Qwen3.8-Max, Alibaba's in-house AI model.
The model has 2.4 trillion parameters, a scale comparable to many frontier models developed in the U.S. The event also covered ways to use AI models while controlling and managing corporate data to prevent leaks outside the company.
Nvidia and OpenAI have likewise been increasing direct contact with startup developers in the Korean market. Nvidia held a "Korea Developer Meetup" at OpenAI's Seoul office on the 12th of this month. The event marked the 10th anniversary of Nvidia's delivery of the DGX-1, an AI supercomputer for deep learning, to OpenAI. Much of the program, however, focused on introducing Nvidia's AI agent tools and OpenAI's Codex-based development workflow to local startup developers.
Anthropic has been supporting its Claude AI model through the Korea Startup Forum, the country's largest startup association, since March this year. The company provides member firms with $10,000 worth of credits to use Claude. About 380 member companies have applied for the credits so far. Of those, roughly 190 are startups that joined the forum after news of Anthropic's support. Membership inquiries surged in a short period, and the forum's first round of applications closed quickly. The forum plans to open a second round soon.
Industry watchers say global AI companies are targeting Korean startups first as a bridgehead for expanding across the broader Korean market. Nvidia is a prime example, having built its ecosystem around CUDA-based libraries, compilers and optimization tools in addition to its graphics processing units. Once an ecosystem takes hold, replacing even one part of it with a rival product requires cascading changes to developer skills and operating environments. The more corporate customers are locked in, the stronger that effect becomes.
"With high-performing Chinese AI models coming out recently, OpenAI has been cutting prices on its latest AI models one after another," an industry official said. "For startups, the fiercer the competition among global companies, the more freedom they have to pick the products that best fit their own services and environments."
