NVIDIA is executing a full-stack play in Korea, and the sequencing matters. Rather than simply selling chips into the country, the company is positioning itself as the architect of Korea's entire sovereign AI infrastructure, from semiconductors and data centers to models, deployment frameworks, and security layers. This is strategic capture disguised as partnership. By investing in startups like Point2, releasing optimized recipes for Korean-built models (A.X K2, K-EXAONE 2.0, Solar Open 2, Motif-3), and creating a collaborative sandbox through the MSIT forum, NVIDIA is making it economically rational for Korean builders to stay within its ecosystem rather than develop alternatives. The NVLink Fusion collaboration with Rebellions and SK Telecom is the keystone: it wraps Korean chip designers and telecom infrastructure into a framework where NVIDIA's open standards become the default operating layer. Korea gets to claim sovereignty, local NPUs, local models, local data centers, while NVIDIA controls the connectivity tissue that makes them work together. This isn't new strategy, but the execution is cleaner than most. The real signal is that NVIDIA has moved past the phase of simply being the best hardware vendor. It's now the only rational choice for countries that want to build indigenous AI capacity without actually building independently. That's a different kind of moat.
Sloane Duvall
A curated reference of models from major AI labs, with open/closed weight status, input modalities, and context window size. American labs tend towards closed weights models and Chinese labs tend toward open weights models.
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