Demis Hassabis met South Korean President Lee Jae Myung at Cheong Wa Dae on Monday and signed an MOU with the Ministry of Science and ICT. The campus will be operational this year. Hassabis accepted a request to send at least 10 Google engineers from US headquarters. He presented Lee with a Go board signed by himself and Lee Se-dol.

Google DeepMind will open an artificial intelligence campus in Seoul, South Korea, the first facility of its kind in the world for the company, after Demis Hassabis met South Korean President Lee Jae Myung at Cheong Wa Dae on Monday. Kim Yong-beom, the presidential chief of staff for policy, confirmed the agreement.

The Science Ministry and Google signed a memorandum of understanding on the campus at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul later the same day, with Minister of Science and ICT Bae Kyung-hoon and Hassabis in attendance. The campus is expected to open within 2026.

The MOU covers joint AI research in science and technology, AI skills development, and the responsible use of AI. Hassabis confirmed he would actively consider dispatching Google researchers to Korea.

Kim quoted him directly: “The CEO instantly accepted our request to send at least 10.” The campus is intended to serve as a hub connecting Google engineers with South Korean startups, researchers, and industrial companies. 

The Ministry of Science and ICT framed it as a key element of Korea’s “K-Moonshot” project, which brings together AI and science capabilities to address major national challenges. South Korea has stated its intention to become one of the world’s top three AI powerhouses alongside the United States and China.

The choice of venue and timing carries specific symbolic weight. The 2016 match between Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo and Korean Go grandmaster Lee Se-dol took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, the same venue where Monday’s MOU was signed.

AlphaGo’s 4–1 victory over Lee Se-dol in March 2016 is widely credited with catalysing the modern wave of investment in artificial intelligence by demonstrating that deep learning could surpass human expert performance in a domain of extreme complexity.

Hassabis cited it explicitly during the meeting, noting that the AlphaGo match had “inspired many advances in AI, including its work in science like the AlphaFold system for protein folding.”

AlphaFold subsequently solved one of biology’s most important open problems: predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequence.

The achievement led to Hassabis being jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024. As a symbolic gesture, Hassabis presented President Lee with a Go board signed by himself and Lee Se-dol, marking the 10th anniversary of the match.

Hassabis also expressed interest in strengthening cooperation with major Korean companies including Samsung, SK Hynix, Hyundai’s Boston Dynamics, and LG, to start new joint projects.

Those four names span the full breadth of Korea’s technology industrial base: Samsung and SK Hynix in semiconductors and memory (both critical to AI infrastructure), Hyundai’s Boston Dynamics in physical AI and robotics, and LG in consumer and enterprise electronics.

The campus, combined with these industrial partnerships, suggests Google is positioning Korea not just as a market for its AI products but as a node in its global AI development and hardware supply chain.

The announcement is consistent with a broader pattern of major technology companies seeking government-endorsed AI campus arrangements in Asia-Pacific democracies. Microsoft’s A$25 billion investment in Australia, includes similar elements: an MOU with the national government, infrastructure expansion tied to a national AI strategy, and skills training commitments.

The Seoul AI campus adds South Korea to a list of countries, alongside Australia, Japan, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, where Google DeepMind and its peers are embedding their AI development presence at the government-partnership level, rather than purely through commercial market entry.

Hassabis also noted that countries like Korea, the UK, and Singapore urgently need to cooperate to build a broader framework for AI safety, pointing to the campus as part of a responsible AI agenda alongside the commercial and research dimensions.