The Koreas | Diplomacy | East Asia

Lee Pushes AI Investment in Silicon Valley and Turns to South American Minerals

The South Korean president secured semiconductor pledges in San Francisco before turning to trade and mineral agreements in Brazil and Chile. 

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung passes an honor guard during a welcome ceremony in Brasilia, Brazil, July 27, 2026.

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung is nearing the end of the longest overseas trip of his 14-month presidency, an 11-day swing that carried him from Silicon Valley’s technology corridor to the mineral-rich economies of South America. Lee, who took office in June 2025, opened the tour with investment pledges from four of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies, then flew on to Brazil and Chile where he secured trade and critical-mineral commitments from both countries. 

In the following days, he will head to Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, to have a summit meeting with Argentine President Javier Milei prior to his final stop in Frankfurt, Germany next week.

The Latin American leg marked Lee’s first tour of the region. The presidential Blue House has framed the trip as part of broader “Global South diplomacy” push that is central to diversifying South Korea’s trade and diplomatic ties beyond the United States, China, and Japan. Brazil, Chile, and Argentina together form a market of some 280 million people with a combined gross domestic product of $3.7 trillion, roughly the size of the world’s seventh-largest economy, according to Seoul. Brazil and Argentina anchor Mercosur, the four-nation South American trade bloc that also includes Paraguay and Uruguay. The Lee administration has spent years trying to negotiate a trade agreement with the bloc.

Lee began the trip on July 24 with separate meetings in San Francisco with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Broadcom President and CEO Hock Tan. Kim Yong-beom, the policy chief for Lee, said the meetings were meant to advance South Korea’s three flagship megaprojects – a government investment push spanning semiconductors, AI data centers and physical AI that Lee announced earlier in his term. 

Speaking at the San Francisco AI Summit on July 25, Lee outlined plans for South Korea to serve as a stable supply base for AI infrastructure even amid a global chip shortage. He unveiled what his office called the San Francisco Declaration on AI, pledging that the country “will become a trusted production base and supply-chain partner for AI chips.”

South Korean and U.S. companies translated the summit into deals worth a combined $950 billion over five years, headlined by a five-year, $200 billion arrangement between Samsung Electronics and Broadcom for the supply of advanced memory chips used in AI accelerators. Lee also met with representatives of six Silicon Valley venture capital firms at an investment........

© The Diplomat