South Korean tech giants Samsung Electronics and SK Group, together with Nvidia and other U.S. companies, have announced deals worth a combined $700 billion in semiconductors and data centers for artificial intelligence. That’s the headline number. Behind it sits a familiar arrangement: corporate giants, backed by state pageantry, carving up the future of computing while ordinary people get told this is progress.
Who Holds the Levers
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung hosted AI Summit in San Francisco on July 24, bringing together leading U.S. and South Korean business figures, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Samsung Chairman Lee Jae-yong. The summit was presented as part of Lee's effort to make South Korea a "global hub" of the AI market. The language is polished. The power is not. A president hosts, executives gather, and the market gets treated like a natural force instead of a system built by institutions with money, access, and state backing.
Reuters also reported that South Korea's SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics signed a partnership with U.S. big tech valued at $950 billion. The figure is staggering, but the structure is plain enough. The companies at the top are not just competing; they’re coordinating. The reporting described the broader push as a coordinated effort involving Samsung Electronics, SK Group, Nvidia and other U.S. companies, with the figures for the overall initiative varying by outlet. Different outlets, different totals. Same machinery.
The Corporate State in Plain Sight
In a separate Reuters report, Samsung Electronics won a $200 billion Broadcom AI chip partnership, a deal aimed at boosting its foundry push and narrowing the gap with TSMC. That’s the logic of the whole arrangement: giant firms using one another to expand production, tighten control over supply chains, and chase dominance in a market built on extraction, concentration, and scale. The people doing the work don’t appear in the summit photos. The communities absorbing the costs don’t get a seat at the table.
The summit in San Francisco was held just one day ago, but the message was already clear. The state helps stage the spectacle. The corporations collect the contracts. The public gets the sales pitch about innovation, hubs, and partnership while the real decisions stay locked inside boardrooms and executive offices.
What They Call Cooperation
The agreements underscore deepening cooperation between the countries in critical AI technologies. That cooperation runs upward, not outward. It binds governments to corporate priorities and wraps industrial consolidation in the language of national strategy. Lee Jae Myung’s push to make South Korea a "global hub" of the AI market fits neatly into that script. The market comes first. The rest is decoration.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Samsung Chairman Lee Jae-yong stood among the leading figures at the summit, a neat visual of how power likes to present itself: polished, international, and inevitable. But the numbers tell the story better than the stagecraft. $700 billion. $950 billion. $200 billion. These aren’t community investments. They’re the scale of concentrated power moving through semiconductors and data centers, with states and corporations acting in concert to secure their place at the top.
The reporting gives no sign of public control, worker control, or community say in any of it. Just deals. Just partnerships. Just the same old hierarchy dressed up as a future worth celebrating.