Hassabis Meets Heads of Korea's Top Four Conglomerates to Discuss Expanding Cooperation in AI and Robotics

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind and often called the "father of AlphaGo," held a series of meetings with the heads of Korea's four major conglomerates, including Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong. Google and major Korean groups are expected to broaden their cooperation in artificial intelligence and robotics.
According to business circles on the 28th, Hassabis met Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Eui-sun at a location in Seoul earlier in the day. The two are said to have discussed expanding cooperation in robotics and AI. Earlier this year at CES in the United States, the world's largest IT and consumer electronics show, Hyundai Motor Group joined forces with Google DeepMind and agreed to work closely together to advance the brain of Atlas, the humanoid robot of its U.S. subsidiary Boston Dynamics.
Around 11:50 a.m. the same day, Hassabis visited LG Twin Towers in Yeouido, Seoul, and held a private luncheon meeting with LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo. Along with Koo, key executives including Lyu Jae-cheol, president of LG Electronics, and Honglak Lee, head of LG AI Research, were reportedly present. Koo also visited Silicon Valley in the United States earlier this month to meet executives from AI companies, underscoring LG Group's focus on creating business results from AI. At a group presidents' meeting late last month, Koo stressed that "speed is the most important thing in AI." The company appears to believe that an early foothold in AI and robotics is urgent. As LG Group is pushing to advance AI models used in a range of hardware, including home appliances and robots, the two sides are believed to have discussed concrete cooperation.
He then visited Samsung Electronics' Seocho office building around 3 p.m. and continued meetings with top executives. Along with Chairman Lee Jae-yong, key executives including Roh Tae-moon, head of the DX Division, were also reportedly present. Samsung Electronics is already a major customer of Google, as it has equipped its Galaxy smartphone series with Google's Gemini AI. At the same time, it is a key partner supplying semiconductors needed to run AI, including high bandwidth memory.
Hassabis later held a dinner meeting with SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and SK hynix CEO Noh-Jung Kwak, where they are understood to have discussed specific cooperation related to AI semiconductors. Since SK hynix supplies HBM to Google's custom AI chip, the Tensor Processing Unit, industry watchers believe memory supply cooperation was a major topic of discussion.
Meanwhile, Madison Huang, senior director of Omniverse and robotics at Nvidia and the eldest daughter of CEO Jensen Huang, visited Korea and met with Yuwon Kim, CEO of NAVER Cloud, a local partner. The meeting is expected to focus on cooperation related to Nvidia's AI infrastructure used by Naver. Centered on Omniverse, Nvidia's digital twin and simulation platform, the two companies could create synergies across Naver's AI, cloud, and robotics businesses.