SK Chairman Chey Tae-won Says "$3 Trillion Investment May Sound Unfamiliar, but It Is Not Far-Fetched"

    [Financial News, San Francisco, U.S. = Reporter Choi Jong-geun]Chey Tae-won, chairman of SK Group, emphasized on the 24th local time that South Korea's large-scale artificial intelligence investment plan "may sound unfamiliar, but it is not far-fetched."
Speaking at the San Francisco AI Summit in San Francisco, where President Lee Jae-myung was in attendance, Chey said, "South Korea has already announced three mega projects," adding, "In dollar terms, the total investment we have announced now exceeds $3 trillion."
He described meetings with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, saying demand for AI semiconductors and computing power is rising rapidly.
Chey said he had dinner with Huang the previous day. "Martinis, pizza and chicken — chicken is never left out," he said. "As we ate, we talked a lot about how far AI will expand in the future, and how many chips NVIDIA will keep buying from us. Jensen is always hungry."
He added, "There is a certain size of NVIDIA's chip demand over the next five years, and I think it is a little frightening." He continued, "I said this today, but when we meet next time, I think he will say, 'That number is wrong — one more.'"
In fact, during his meeting with President Lee earlier in the day, Huang said, "We have celebrated the results with many partners and made a number of remarkable announcements. SK Group and NVIDIA will announce a business partnership between the two companies today," adding that "the scale amounts to $500 billion."
Chey also said, "The more you touch an AI plan, the bigger it gets," adding, "I cannot help but suspect that what we have announced may end up looking like a small number compared with the projects we are now building."
He also said, "What you can confirm here today is that what we are doing is not some reckless announcement or talk," and added, "These were quite realistic ideas, grounded in reality."
Chey stressed that South Korea should become the world's AI testbed, saying, "Perhaps our goal now should be for every person in the country to have at least one AI agent."
He also said South Korea must produce more memory chips and build more AI data centers to integrate them into global infrastructure. "There is a need for it to become a hub for AI data centers connecting the U.S., Europe and Asia," he said.

[email protected] Choi Jong-geun Reporter