SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won Meets Sam Altman for Lunch; SK hynix and SKT Executives Also Attend

[Financial News] SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won met for lunch with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who was visiting South Korea. Senior executives from SK hynix and SK Telecom were also reportedly in attendance. The specific agenda was not disclosed, but attention is focused on what stage the AI cooperation built through a series of meetings will move to.
According to business sources on the 31st, Chairman Chey and CEO Altman met that day at an undisclosed location in Seoul and had lunch together. Executives from SK hynix and SK Telecom were also reportedly present.
This was not the first meeting between the two. Chairman Chey met CEO Altman when he visited South Korea in January 2024, and they met again that June at OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco, United States.
They also met in Seoul in February 2025, and discussed the direction of AI infrastructure cooperation at an AI event held in the United States last July. Their exchanges, which began with one-off meetings, have developed into business discussions spanning semiconductors and data centers.
The cooperation took concrete form in written agreements in October last year. Chairman Chey and CEO Altman met at the SK Seorin Building in Seoul’s Jongno District and signed a letter of intent (LOI) on memory supply and a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on cooperation for AI data centers in the southwestern region. SK hynix would establish production capabilities to meet OpenAI’s HBM demand, while SK Telecom would work with OpenAI to explore plans for developing, building and operating AI data centers in South Korea.
At the time, SK said SK hynix would prepare production capabilities to meet demand of up to 900,000 wafers per month, measured on a DRAM wafer basis. This was a production-capacity plan; the actual supply volume and terms would be decided after further discussions. Nor was the domestic data center cooperation between SK Telecom and OpenAI announced as a project with a specific site and schedule confirmed. 
At each of their meetings, Chairman Chey and CEO Altman have continued discussions on the AI industry and infrastructure cooperation. It has not been disclosed how far the memory supply and data center cooperation announced last year was fleshed out at this meeting. A follow-up announcement on domestic data centers, previewed for later this year, is expected to mark the next turning point in the two sides’ cooperation.
[email protected] Yoon Hong-jip Reporter