Lee Jae-myung
President of South Korea
South Korea’s president was elected on a pledge of 100 trillion won in AI investment to make Korea a top-3 global AI power — the “AI G3” — backed by tens of thousands of GPUs, a presidential AI committee, and a trillion-dollar chip drive.
In his words
We must secure the core elements of AI faster than any other country.
Biography
Lee Jae-myung (born 1963), a former factory worker turned human-rights lawyer and governor of Gyeonggi province, won South Korea’s presidency in June 2025 in the snap election that followed Yoon Suk-yeol’s martial-law crisis and impeachment. Amid the political chaos, his economic platform had one unmistakable center of gravity: artificial intelligence.
The AI G3 campaign
Lee campaigned on committing 100 trillion won (roughly $75 billion) to AI over five years, with the explicit goal of making South Korea one of the world’s top three AI powers — branded “AI G3.” In September 2025 he launched a presidential National AI Strategy Committee under his direct leadership, alongside plans to secure more than 50,000 high-performance GPUs, expand national AI computing centers, and back homegrown foundation models from companies like Naver, LG and SK Telecom.
By June 2026, the program had swollen into a national industrial mobilization: his government announced an investment drive exceeding $1 trillion in AI and semiconductors with Samsung and SK Hynix at its core, and Lee called the AI-driven tax windfall from chipmakers a “golden window” to be reinvested rather than spent. Skeptics — including analysts who compare the gamble to the Park Chung-hee industrialization era — question whether Korea can leapfrog the US and China in models rather than just memory chips, and note the plan depends on chaebol conglomerates whose concentration Lee once campaigned against.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
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