NC founder’s past relationship with Jensen Huang back in spotlight

NC founder and CEO Kim Taek-jin / Courtesy of NC

The long-standing relationship between NC CEO Kim Taek-jin and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is back in the spotlight, as the chief of the global artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant prepares for a rare one-on-one meeting with the Korean game mogul during his visit to Seoul.

Huang is set to arrive Friday for a packed itinerary with a group of conglomerate leaders here. Notably, he is scheduled to meet separately with Kim on Sunday to explore comprehensive technological cooperation in gaming and physical AI, referring to AI embedded in robots and autonomous systems.

Among Korean gaming executives, Kim is the only one on Huang's official meeting list. Their bond dates back to 2008, when NC launched Aion, its blockbuster massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

At the time, the two companies formed a strategic marketing alliance, releasing limited edition Aion GeForce 9800GT graphics cards to commemorate the game's open beta test. GeForce is Nvidia’s flagship graphic card brand.

That collaboration has seamlessly extended into the cutting-edge hardware era. At the G-Star 2025 game exhibition last November, NC partnered with Nvidia, Samsung Electronics, Intel and Microsoft to showcase its upcoming titles, Aion 2 and Cinder City.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers a speech at Marvell's keynote during the Computex 2026 exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan, Tuesday. AP-Yonhap

The joint exhibition booth successfully demonstrated a high-performance ecosystem, pairing Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50-series graphics chips with Samsung's displays to run NC's next-generation titles.

Industry officials said Huang places a premium on loyalty, maintaining deep connections with business leaders who supported Nvidia before it became a trillion-dollar AI juggernaut.

This sentiment was mirrored last year when Huang held an informal chicken-and-beer meeting in Seoul with Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Chung Euisun, referring to them as “gganbu” — a Korean term for best friends.

“While Huang has recently focused on hardware partnerships amid the global semiconductor boom, his meeting with Kim transcends pure business,” an industry official said. “It is a symbolic gesture highlighting his loyalty to past partners.”

The convergence of virtual world modeling and simulation technologies — areas in which both NC and Nvidia have accumulated significant expertise through gaming and AI — could provide a foundation for expanded cooperation in robotics and broader physical AI applications.

NC has been aggressively pivoting toward its subsidiary, NC AI, which recently joined a consortium with Hyundai Rotem to develop a physical AI-based integrated simulator for the Agency for Defense Development.

NC AI is also currently leading the development of a “world model” that allows robots to learn physical understanding, while co-developing intelligent robotics technology with Samsung SDS and POSCO DX.