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."
Copyright ⓒ Aju Press All rights reserved.