Korea Advances Physical AI Across Industries With NVIDIA

NVIDIA says Korea's manufacturing and engineering strengths are drawing industry leaders onto its accelerated computing, AI and simulation stack, spanning semiconductor manufacturing, robotics and autonomous vehicles. Two announcements in the post outline where that work stands: an expanded Samsung Electronics collaboration on semiconductor engineering and a Kakao Mobility effort aimed at a level 4 autonomous driving system.

At Samsung, the collaboration covers materials research, process development and device engineering. For technology computer-aided design, the company is using NVIDIA cuISS and cuDSS to speed computations involving sparse linear systems, alongside GPU acceleration for process and optical simulations. In materials research, Samsung's sMOL platform has run selected quantum chemical calculations up to 5x faster end to end with NVIDIA cuEST, and the company is exploring NVIDIA cuEquivariance to accelerate tensor operations used in training and inference for atomistic AI models.

Samsung is also building chip-scale thermal and mechanical analysis workflows on NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo. In one AI homogenization case, combining AI-predicted effective material properties, coarser grids and GPU acceleration produced a roughly 1,600x speedup — cutting a fine-grid solve from about 18 hours on a 32-core CPU to 41 seconds on a GPU-accelerated coarse-grid solve. NVIDIA suggests its Agent Toolkit could later connect those simulation tools and AI models, so future engineering agents can run analyses and compare design options.

Kakao Mobility plans to build on NVIDIA's autonomous vehicle computing and safety technologies toward a level 4 system, pairing its own driving software and experience operating in Seoul's Gangnam district with NVIDIA's vehicle computing platform. The company intends to use NVIDIA Hyperion, a reference platform for vehicle sensors and compute powered by NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor, plus NVIDIA Halos for safety across development and validation. Initial development is planned around Kia purpose-built vehicles, integrating Kakao Mobility's autonomous driving software with NVIDIA's technologies, with an aim of supporting future level 4 mobility services in Korea.

What to watch: the Samsung gains are reported for specific workflows, and the post does not say how broadly they extend across the company's fabs or how the Agent Toolkit connection would work in practice. For Kakao Mobility, the timeline, the scale of testing beyond Gangnam and how Hyperion, Thor and Halos fit together in production vehicles remain open questions.

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