NCsoft's Kim Taek-jin meets Jensen Huang: '25-year alliance from Lineage will grow stronger with AI'

NCsoft CEO Kim Taek-jin and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang held a surprise meeting at a PC bang in Seoul, with NCsoft saying the encounter marks a new chapter in a 25-year partnership — one the company plans to deepen across next-generation technology areas including physical AI.

NCsoft said Sunday that Kim and Huang met at a PC bang in Gangnam-gu to mark the 25th anniversary of the two companies' global partnership. The venue was deliberate: the PC bang is the symbolic space where both companies built their business foundations.

At the event, Kim and Huang introduced Nvidia's next-generation Windows superchip, the RTX Spark, and gave away laptops equipped with GeForce RTX GPUs and the RTX Spark to players on site. The two executives also used RTX Spark-equipped laptops to showcase gameplay footage from NCsoft's latest title "Aion 2" and its upcoming release "Cinder City."

The two companies plan to expand their collaboration into next-generation technology areas including physical AI, with the goal of accelerating innovation in gameplay experiences across real-time simulation, physics-based computing and AI-driven interactive technology.

NCsoft and Nvidia have maintained a partnership dating to the early 2000s, when they began collaborating on the "Lineage" series. The two companies have also made repeated joint appearances at major domestic and international gaming events, including Gamescom, G-Star and the GeForce Gamer Festival.

NCsoft is currently developing "Cinder City" using Nvidia's latest RTX graphics technology. Nvidia unveiled the title as an RTX flagship at last year's Gamescom, and NCsoft said the game was the sole title selected for a playable demo at the GeForce Gamer Festival.

NCsoft is also working to fine-tune domain-specific models optimized for Korea's industrial environment using NVIDIA Cosmos, Nvidia's video-generation-based world model. The company is simultaneously developing its own world model and a robotics foundation model.

"I am very pleased to meet gamers in Korea together with Nvidia's Jensen Huang, with whom we have maintained more than 20 years of collaboration since the early 2000s," Kim said. "We will continue to work with Nvidia on new game development and AI research."