Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will visit Tokyo on July 15 to attend an event marking the 30th anniversary of Nvidia's partnership with game company Sega. [Getty Images]
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will visit Tokyo on July 15 to attend an event marking the 30th anniversary of Nvidia's partnership with game company Sega. [Getty Images]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose two recent visits to South Korea without stopping in Japan had fueled a "Japan-passing" debate, will travel to Japan on Wednesday.

Nvidia GeForce Japan's account on X, formerly Twitter, announced Monday that Huang will attend an event in Tokyo's Akihabara district on Wednesday to introduce the company's high-performance AI product, the RTX Spark.

The event marks the 30th anniversary of Nvidia's partnership with Japanese game company Sega. Sega CEO Satomi Harunori, former president Irimajiri Shoichiro and Virtua Fighter creator Suzuki Yu are also expected to attend.

In a commencement address at Carnegie Mellon University in May, Huang said Sega had invested $5 million in Nvidia in the mid-1990s when the company was on the brink of bankruptcy, helping it survive the crisis. He expressed gratitude to Sega for its support at the time.

The RTX Spark, which Huang will showcase at the event, is a next-generation AI chip for PCs that combines powerful AI computing with high-performance graphics. It is recognized for delivering capabilities tailored to AI model and service development as well as gaming.

Huang visited South Korea in October last year and again last month, meeting with top executives from major memory chip companies including Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, as well as senior government officials. His visits drew such attention that the fried chicken restaurant he dined at and the streets of Hongdae became tourist attractions.

After Huang's samgyeopsal dinner in Hongdae last month, Japanese media outlets including the Nikkei said he had been visiting major memory chip-producing countries such as Taiwan and South Korea while leaving Japan off his itinerary. Japanese media at the time raised concerns ranging from self-critical assessments that Japan lacked companies attractive enough to draw Nvidia's attention, to fears that Japan was being left out of collaboration with Nvidia — widely regarded as the most important company in the current AI boom.


kate01@heraldcorp.com