The Man in the Leather Jacket Who Keeps Coming Back
Jensen Huang stepped off his jet at Seoul's Gimpo Business Aviation Center on the afternoon of June 5, 2026, just days after commanding stages at Computex 2026 and GTC Taipei. It was his second visit to Korea in under a year, and the country was ready. A fan-built website tracking his every expected location was already live, showing a real-time map of his itinerary across the city. Korean television crews were stationed outside airports and restaurants. The online buzz looked less like anticipation for a business trip and more like countdown coverage for a global celebrity arrival.
But Jensen Huang is not in Seoul for a photo opportunity. His schedule for this trip includes a pork belly barbecue dinner with the chairs of SK Group, LG, Hyundai Motor Group, and Naver at a restaurant called Hyungnim Jeoyo. A ceremonial first pitch at a Doosan Bears baseball game. A sit-down on one of Korea's most-watched variety programs, "You Quiz on the Block." A visit to Seoul National University's AI and robotics laboratories. For the CEO of the world's most valuable chip company, it is an uncommonly personal, uncommonly cultural kind of itinerary. And that is precisely the strategy.
 |
| Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang arrives at the Gimpo Business Aviation Center in Gangseo-gu, Seoul, on Friday afternoon. [Photo by Seoul Economic Daily] |
Two Korean words sit at the center of everything: Kkanbu and Hyungnim. They are not vocabulary you find in standard business dictionaries. But understanding them is the key to understanding exactly what Jensen Huang is doing in Korea, why he keeps coming back, and why it works so well.
 |
| Two worlds at one table: the unmistakable symbols of how Jensen Huang shows up in Korea. |
Kkanbu: A Bond That Goes Beyond Business
Most people outside Korea first heard the word through Squid Game, Netflix's global phenomenon, in a scene where an elderly player declares to a younger companion: "We are Kkanbu, aren't we?" The line carries so much emotional weight in Korean because it does not simply mean friend. It describes a very particular kind of alliance, originally borrowed from children's street games where two players would pool all their playing pieces and compete as a single unit. Everything was shared, wins, losses, and every last marble in the bag. No accounting, no keeping score. Just total mutual investment in a shared outcome.
In adult life, the concept carried over into something even more emotionally loaded. A true Kkanbu is not someone you do business with. It is someone you face the world alongside. The relationship implies loyalty that does not expire when deals shift, shared risk that goes beyond any contract clause, and a bond that outsiders recognize and cannot easily displace. In a high-stakes industry like AI semiconductors, where supply chain relationships can tilt the balance of power within a single product cycle, having a Kkanbu is not a soft relational benefit. It is a strategic advantage that compounds over time.
When Jensen Huang chose Kkanbu Chicken in Gangnam as the venue for his October 2025 dinner with Samsung Chairman Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai Motor Group Chair Chung Euisun, Nvidia specifically selected that restaurant. The name, the casual setting, the format of fried chicken and cold beer, all of it delivered a message that no press release could replicate: we are not here to buy your components and disappear. We are your Kkanbu.
 |
| Chimaek: fried chicken and cold beer, the meal that cemented a billion-dollar bond in Gangnam. |
Hyungnim: The Weight Behind the Word
If Kkanbu describes a horizontal bond between equals who share everything, Hyungnim operates on a different axis entirely. Literally translated, it means older brother, or a senior person deserving of deep respect. But its real meaning in Korean social life is richer and more emotionally charged than any translation manages to capture.
To call someone Hyungnim is to enter a specific kind of relational contract that runs in both directions. You acknowledge their seniority, their authority, their position above you in the social and professional order. And in return, you expect something very specific from them: protection, care, and the understanding that they will use their position to look out for you as well as themselves. In Korean business culture, where hierarchy is real but warmth within that hierarchy is equally prized, offering someone the title of Hyungnim is one of the highest relational gestures available. It is trust made audible.
The venue for Jensen Huang's June 2026 dinner is called Hyungnim Jeoyo, which translates roughly as "Hey big brother, over here." It is a casual pork belly barbecue restaurant near Hongik University in western Seoul, exactly the kind of place that signals comfort and familiarity over formality and distance. By gathering SK Group Chair Chey Tae-won, LG Group Chair Koo Kwang-mo, Hyundai Motor Group Chair Chung Euisun, and Naver Chair Lee Hae-jin around a pork belly grill at a restaurant with that name, the symbolism is impossible to miss. Jensen Huang is not visiting his vendors. He is the big brother at the table, and the most powerful figures in Korean industry are gathering around him as though that is exactly where they all belong.
The Night Three Billionaires Ordered Chicken for Everyone
The groundwork for all of this was laid on October 30, 2025, during what Korean media immediately dubbed the first Kkanbu Summit. Jensen Huang met Samsung's Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai's Chung Euisun at a Kkanbu Chicken branch in Samseong-dong, Gangnam, at around 7:30 in the evening. The surrounding streets were packed within minutes by reporters, camera crews, and ordinary Koreans hoping to catch a glimpse of the trio. National broadcasters aired live footage of three of the world's most powerful business figures sharing crispy fried chicken, cheese sticks, and cold bottles of Terra beer. The single lane in front of the restaurant was so crowded that a single person could barely squeeze through.
What Huang did next is the part Korea still talks about. He rang the restaurant's golden bell, the signal to cover the bill for every diner in the room. He then walked outside and personally handed chicken, kimbap, and banana-flavored milk to the crowd gathered on the street. He gave autographs. He held up baskets of chicken wings and called out to the crowd, "Anyone? Fried chicken?" He turned to Lee and Chung and told them, "Today is the best day of my life." Samsung's Lee eventually settled the tab, and Hyundai's Chung covered a second round. Before leaving, Huang presented each of them with a box labeled Nvidia DGX, the company's flagship AI system.
The Kkanbu Chicken founder himself served the dishes that evening. The scene generated social media coverage that reached across Asia and into Western business press. And at the heart of it was a single, clear message: a trillion-dollar tech company was treating Korea's industrial leaders not as strategic assets, but as people worth spending an actual evening with.
 |
| The partnership goes deeper than supply chains. Korea and Nvidia are building something together. |
The Localization Genius Behind the Casual Dinners
Reducing what Jensen Huang does in Korea to "great PR" would be a significant underestimation. The cultural intelligence at work here is architectural in its precision. Someone at Nvidia studied how Korean business relationships are built, and made a series of very deliberate choices about how to embed the company inside that cultural logic at its deepest level.
The restaurant selection for October 2025 was Nvidia's choice, not the hosts'. Madison Huang, Jensen's daughter and Nvidia's senior director for Omniverse and robotics product marketing, was reportedly involved in organizing both the first and second Korea trip arrangements. The details, from the restaurant name to the post-dinner behavior to the careful balance of public accessibility and private conversation, reflect a strategy built on a single clear insight: in Korean business culture, the most durable relationships are relational, not transactional. The companies that are seen as purely extractive, arriving for the chips and moving on, are tolerated. The ones that are seen as genuinely invested and emotionally present are given something no contract can purchase: loyalty, flexibility, and priority when conditions get complicated.
At Computex 2026 in Taipei, just days before this Seoul trip, Huang leaned over an SK Hynix exhibition booth and wrote the words "Please make more" on an HBM4E wafer. In three words, he captured the entire tone he has been building with Korea: personal, warm, direct, and carrying the implicit understanding that he considers himself part of the production team rather than a customer submitting a purchase order.
What the Bond Is Actually Worth
The affection Jensen Huang has cultivated in Korea is not a separate performance running alongside Nvidia's business interests there. It is their foundation. This June 2026 visit arrives at a moment when Nvidia's dependence on Korean manufacturing and engineering is deeper than at any point in the company's history. SK Hynix supplies the high-bandwidth memory that powers Nvidia's AI accelerators, and the HBM supply chain has become the single most consequential chokepoint in global AI infrastructure. Samsung is working hard to close the gap in the same space. Hyundai Motor Group has entered a strategic partnership with Nvidia on physical AI, autonomous driving, and robotics. LG and Naver are each building out AI infrastructure that runs on Nvidia platforms.
During his arrival in Seoul, Huang confirmed that Nvidia has already begun hiring for a research and development center in Korea, and signaled that a manufacturing site may follow once staffing is sufficient. "Korea is so good at building things," he told reporters at the airport. "I have no trouble building a beautiful site here when the time is ready." For a country whose semiconductor and engineering capabilities have shaped global technology supply chains for decades, those words, coming from the man whose company now sits at the center of the AI economy, carry real weight.
The fanbase watching all of this in real time is not incidental to the strategy. A B2B chip company that generates celebrity-level public enthusiasm, with fan tracking websites, street crowds outside chicken restaurants, and live television coverage of business dinners, has achieved something most enterprise tech companies never attempt: it has made ordinary Korean people feel personally invested in its success. When Koreans cheer for Jensen Huang, they are in some sense cheering for the supply chains and partnerships that connect their country's future to the center of the global AI economy. That identification between a foreign corporation and a national community is rare. And it is worth a great deal more than any single contract.
Korean culture has a word for the quality that makes relationships like this possible: jeong, a deep emotional attachment that builds over time through repeated presence and genuine care. Jeong cannot be purchased and cannot be faked. It has to be earned, one dinner at a time. The pork belly is on the grill at Hyungnim Jeoyo tonight, the soju glasses are poured, and Korea's most powerful business leaders are gathered around a table with a man in a leather jacket who has done the rare and genuinely difficult thing of earning their trust on their own terms. What happens at that table, and what it takes to keep that kind of trust alive across the years ahead, is the real story this visit has put in motion. What would you call it, if not Kkanbu?
References
Korea Times: "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visits Seoul for robotics, AI, gaming partnerships," June 2026. CNBC: "South Korea is obsessing over Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's visit," June 2026. Korea Herald: "Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Samsung, Hyundai chiefs get chummy over chimaek," October 2025. CNN: "Three billionaires dropped by a fried chicken joint, Jensen Huang paid everyone's dinner," October 2025. Seoul Economic Daily: "Jensen Huang to Visit Korea for Possible Second Kkanbu Summit," May 2026. Businesskorea: "Jensen Huang Dines with Lee Jae-yong and Chung Euisun," October 2025.
Explore more Insights into Korean Lifestyle:
- culture / hangeul / k-culture / ktodayMar 30, 2026
.webp)
- culture / hangeul / K-romance / korean honorifics / korean wordsApr 30, 2026
- culture / hangeul / k-culture / ktodayMar 30, 2026
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
0 Comments