Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, who also serves as Chairman of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, converse with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the Korea-U.S. Business Roundtable reception held at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., last year. [Yonhap News] 

It has been confirmed that Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, and Naver Chairman Lee Hae-jin are meeting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in the United States.

This gathering of Korea's AI leaders across different sectors—all of whom are driving the global AI market—in the U.S. is considered highly unusual. Analysts suggest that the meeting aims to strengthen cooperation in the memory and AI businesses and reaffirm the robust growth trajectory of the AI market.

According to industry sources on the 22nd, plans are underway for a roundtable meeting this week near Silicon Valley in the U.S., involving the leaders of Samsung, SK, Naver, and Nvidia.

The meeting is reportedly expected to take place on the 24th.

It is highly likely that Chairman Lee, Chairman Chey, Chairman Lee, and CEO Huang will attend, with the possibility of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also participating.

Business observers note that if this meeting is realized, it would effectively be the first time that leaders of the world's top companies in the fields of memory, GPUs, and generative AI services have gathered in one place.

Jensen Huang and Chairman Chey Tae-won serving chicken [Yonhap News] 

Notably, CEO Jensen Huang visited Korea early last month to meet with leaders from major domestic companies including Samsung, SK, Hyundai Motor, LG, and Naver. This follow-up meeting only a month later underscores the importance of his partnerships with Korean firms.

OpenAI and Anthropic are considered the most influential players currently leading the generative AI market with ChatGPT and Claude, respectively.

The meeting appears designed to highlight a strategic "alliance and cooperation" across the AI ecosystem, featuring key players: Samsung and SK in memory, Nvidia in AI chips such as GPUs, and Naver, OpenAI, and Anthropic in generative AI services.

Korea is establishing itself beyond a mere supplier of memory semiconductors in the global AI market, emerging instead as a core partner for AI infrastructure. The expansion of cooperation between U.S. Big Tech firms and Korean semiconductor companies is seen as a testament to this competitiveness.

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are supplying high-performance memory, including High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), to Nvidia, and both companies' HBM4 will be integrated into the next-generation AI accelerator "Vera Rubin," slated for release in the second half of this year.

Samsung and SK are also supplying memory for OpenAI's proprietary AI chips and signed agreements last year to provide high-performance memory for "Stargate," a next-generation AI infrastructure project worth hundreds of trillions of won.

'AI Alliance'…Jensen Huang, Lee Jae-yong, and Euisun Chung's 'close-knit meeting' [Yonhap News file photo]

Cooperation is expanding beyond memory into foundry services as well. Samsung Electronics is handling the foundry for "Groq 3," a Language Processing Unit (LPU) for inference that will be mounted on the Nvidia platform, and Anthropic has recently been in discussions regarding producing AI chips using Samsung's 2-nanometer process, broadening the scope of their collaboration.

In the case of Naver, the meeting is expected to cover cooperation strategies related to building "AI factories."

An AI factory is a facility that supports large-scale AI computation by integrating physical infrastructure—such as GPU servers, data centers, and power and cooling systems—with AI models and cloud technology.

Some analysts suggest that this meeting could produce a future blueprint that might dispel recent concerns regarding a "peak-out" in the semiconductor and AI industries.

Major memory manufacturers like Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron, as well as key semiconductor stocks like Nvidia, have been underperforming, with their share prices falling by double digits from their peaks.

Despite the spreading fears of an "AI peak-out," the prevailing view in the industry is that the demand for AI infrastructure investment will remain robust over the next two to three years, leading many to believe that the supply shortage for memory semiconductors will persist through next year.