South Korean AI startups Upstage and Rebellions have separately met Nvidia executives as they explore potential cooperation across the chipmaker’s GPU-centered ecosystem. Upstage CEO Kim Sung-hoon met Madison Huang, senior director of Omniverse Robotics and the eldest daughter of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, at Nvidia’s California headquarters after Huang invited Kim during his U.S. business trip. Nvidia asked how it could support Upstage’s large language model capabilities and said it would review cooperation positively. Upstage has passed the second-stage evaluation of South Korea’s government-backed independent AI foundation model project and is working on production-ready models and overseas expansion ahead of the third stage. The company is also raising pre-IPO equity investment. Separately, Rebellions CEO Park Sung-hyun met Jensen Huang at Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara last month, in what Rebellions said was their first meeting. While the meeting prompted speculation about a possible acquisition, industry sentiment favors exploratory technical cooperation, potentially combining Rebellions’ neural processing units with Nvidia GPUs. Rebellions, founded in 2020, was selected in March as the first direct investment target of the National Growth Fund and secured 250 billion won, or about $185.9 million, from the Advanced Strategic Industry Fund. Nvidia’s rack-scale Vera Rubin NVL72 system combines GPUs, CPUs and DPUs, while its work with Groq illustrates a broader approach of pairing different processors for specialized workloads. Any cooperation would face challenges involving software, interconnects, technology disclosure and, in an acquisition scenario, South Korean technology-protection rules. No specific technical partnership or acquisition involving Nvidia and either startup has been confirmed as currently underway.