Lee Jae-yong, Chey Tae-won, and Lee Hae-jin to Meet Jensen Huang in the U.S. ... Can They Dispel Peak-Season Concerns Over AI Chips?

[Financial News] Lee Jae-yong, chairman of Samsung Electronics; Chey Tae-won, chairman of SK Group; and Lee Hae-jin, chairman of Naver, will meet in the United States with Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of NVIDIA, and Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI.
Attention is focused on whether the meeting will serve as a chance to confirm the growth momentum of NVIDIA-led advanced artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators and AI systems, along with the Korean memory chips linked to them.
According to industry sources on the 22nd, Lee Jae-yong, Chey Tae-won, and Lee Hae-jin are reportedly being arranged to meet Huang in a roundtable format near Silicon Valley on the 24th. Chung Eui-sun, chairman of Hyundai Motor Group, as well as Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, are also being mentioned as possible attendees. If their attendance is finalized, top leaders from the world's leading companies in generative AI, graphics processing units (GPU), and semiconductors will gather in one place.


In the short term, the meeting is expected to offer direction on concerns that memory chip stocks may have peaked. It could also broaden the scope for cooperation with big tech companies in the AI transition, including AI data centers and AI factories. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix supply NVIDIA with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and other high-performance memory chips. Their HBM4 chips will also be installed in NVIDIA's next-generation AI accelerator, Vera Rubin, which is set to launch in the second half of the year.
Plans for cooperation between NVIDIA and Korean companies are also expected to accelerate. Huang visited South Korea early last month and met with business leaders from Samsung, SK, Hyundai, LG, and Naver to discuss supply issues for NVIDIA products in areas such as autonomous driving, robotics, and AI factories. Observers say the Silicon Valley meeting could give more practical momentum to cooperation with Korean companies.
Whether Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, will appear is also drawing interest. The two companies are leading the generative AI market with Claude and ChatGPT. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are supplying memory chips for OpenAI's in-house AI chips, and last year they also signed an agreement to provide high-performance memory for Stargate, a next-generation AI infrastructure project worth hundreds of trillions of won. More recently, Anthropic has also been discussing the production of AI chips using Samsung Electronics' 2-nanometer process, expanding the scope of cooperation.
  


[email protected] Jo Eun-hyo Reporter