Lee Jae-yong to Meet Jensen Huang... Will They Discuss Cooperation on the Gwangju Fab and AI Data Center?

[Financial News] Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong is reportedly arranging a meeting with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang in the United States later this month. The meeting would be the first since the government and Samsung and SK Group announced the 'Three Major Mega Projects for a Great Leap Forward for the Republic of Korea,' and attention is focused on whether they will discuss cooperation on building a Gwangju semiconductor fab and a massive AI data center.
According to Dong-A Ilbo on the 10th, Lee is coordinating his schedule to meet Huang in Silicon Valley later this month.
If the meeting takes place, it will be the first official encounter between the two in about nine months, since they joined Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Eui-sun for a so-called 'chimaek' meeting at a chicken restaurant in Gangnam, Seoul, during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in October last year.
The meeting is drawing even more attention because it comes after Samsung and SK Group, together with the government, announced the 'Three Major Mega Projects for a Great Leap Forward for the Republic of Korea' on the 29th of last month.
The government-led projects include plans to build a Gwangju semiconductor fab worth about 800 trillion won and AI data centers nationwide worth more than 1,000 trillion won. Industry observers say cooperation with NVIDIA, which leads the AI semiconductor market, will be a key factor in the success of these projects.
In particular, analysts say expanding NVIDIA's participation in the supply chain will be important to strengthen the competitiveness of the future Gwangju fab and the semiconductor cluster in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province. Securing NVIDIA AI chips for AI data centers is also essential for server construction, but AI accelerators are currently in short supply globally, with orders from big tech companies piling up.
Earlier, domestic companies secured 260,000 NVIDIA AI chips following a meeting between President Lee Jae-myung and Huang in October last year.
Another point of interest is whether the two companies will expand semiconductor cooperation.
Samsung Electronics and NVIDIA are broadening their partnership beyond memory semiconductors and GPU cooperation into foundry operations as well. Samsung Electronics is manufacturing Grok's language processing unit (LPU) on a contract basis, and at the end of May it supplied HBM4E samples, the world's first seventh-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM), to NVIDIA and other major clients.
Industry sources say that if the meeting is realized, the agenda could include HBM4E validation and mass production cooperation, as well as ways to expand collaboration in AI semiconductors and foundry operations.
y27k@fnnews.com Seo Yoon-kyung Reporter