Bill Gates Back in Seoul After a Year, With Small Modular Reactors on the Table

Bill Gates arrived in South Korea on August 13 to discuss small modular reactor (SMR) cooperation with senior government figures and business leaders, his first trip to the country in roughly a year. The Microsoft co-founder, who chairs the Gates Foundation and leads the advanced-reactor developer TerraPower, last visited in August 2025, and his schedule this time is expected to include meetings with SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and HD Hyundai’s Chung Ki-sun.

Why a Software Billionaire Keeps Returning for Nuclear Talks

Gates’s Korean itineraries have increasingly revolved around one venture: TerraPower, the company he founded to commercialize next-generation nuclear technology. South Korea is a natural stop for that agenda. The country retains one of the few intact nuclear supply chains among advanced economies, spanning reactor components, heavy manufacturing, and plant construction — capabilities that any SMR developer racing toward commercial deployment needs to secure.

That he is meeting both government officials and corporate chiefs on the same trip underlines how SMR projects work in practice: reactor designs come from developers like TerraPower, but licensing, financing, and fabrication depend on state policy and industrial partners moving together.

Chey Tae-won’s Two Hats at the Table

Gates’s most closely watched counterpart is Chey Tae-won, who brings an unusual dual mandate to any such meeting. Chey has run SK Group since 1998, when he took over at age 38 following the death of his father, Chey Jong-hyun. The group he leads is South Korea’s second-largest conglomerate, spanning 186 affiliate companies including SK Innovation, SK Hynix, and SK Telecom — a portfolio that touches both the energy business where SMRs would operate and the semiconductor business whose power demands are helping drive interest in them.

Chey has also chaired the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry since March 2021, which makes him a spokesman for Korean business as a whole, not just his own group. A conversation with him is, in effect, a conversation with the broader Korean industrial establishment.

The presence of HD Hyundai’s Chung Ki-sun points to a second thread. HD Hyundai’s core strength is shipbuilding and heavy industry, precisely the kind of large-scale fabrication capacity that SMR manufacturing — and, further out, marine applications of small reactors — would draw on.

Talks Planned, Outcomes Still Open

It is worth being precise about what has and has not happened. The visit and the intent to discuss SMR cooperation are confirmed; concrete agreements are not, and no detailed agenda has been disclosed. Any tangible outcome — a supply contract, an expanded investment, a joint development framework — would come after these discussions, not from the arrival itself.

Still, the pattern is telling. A one-year cadence of visits, meetings anchored by the heads of Korea’s second-largest conglomerate and its flagship shipbuilder, and a consistent SMR theme suggest that Korea’s role in TerraPower’s plans is being negotiated as an ongoing industrial relationship rather than a one-off transaction. For Seoul, which has been positioning its nuclear sector for export growth, that is exactly the kind of relationship its industrial policy is designed to attract.