SK Group Chairman Engages US Tech Leaders on AI Chips

SK Group Chairman Engages US Tech Leaders on AI Chips

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won has drawn attention from the business community after holding consecutive meetings with top executives from U.S. tech giants, including NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft, and Broadcom, within a week to discuss AI (artificial intelligence) chip collaboration.

Chairman Chey has maintained confidentiality regarding meetings with external figures outside official events in his capacity as chairman of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry. However, this U.S. visit is different. Details about who he met and when, centered on SK Hynix, have been disclosed in detail.

A source from the business community stated,

Meetings between specific group leaders are rare to publicize, as they could inadvertently provoke other clients or competitors.

The business sector views Chairman Chey’s absence from a meeting with group leaders, convened by President Lee Jae Myung to increase youth employment and expand regional investment, as well as the timing of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s ‘fake news’ controversy during his U.S. trip, as not unrelated. There are reactions that this is to emphasize the inevitability of not being able to respond to domestic issues while staying in the country for the ‘semiconductor’ industry, which has become a national task. Many argue that direct meetings between top decision-makers are unavoidable, given recent memory semiconductor supply shortages and AI data center-related issues, which require large-scale investments.

According to SK Hynix Newsroom on the 13th, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won met with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at a restaurant in Santa Clara, U.S., on the 5th. During this meeting, Huang invited Chairman Chey to discuss opinions on various AI business collaborations. SK Hynix collaborates with NVIDIA by supplying HBM (high-bandwidth memory) products. On the 6th, he met with Broadcom CEO Hock Tan at the company’s headquarters, which is developing next-generation AI chips, to share mid- to long-term memory market outlooks, supply strategies, and investment portfolios between the two companies. The core agenda included response strategies related to next-generation AI chip architecture and memory integration technology.

On the 10th, Chairman Chey met with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and executives in San Jose, U.S., to discuss long-term memory supply collaboration. SK Hynix has been a key partner, supplying enterprise SSDs and server DRAM to Meta data centers. Through this discussion, the companies agreed to expand their collaboration to next-generation AI infrastructure. Meta, which is developing the AI accelerator ‘MTIA,’ also discussed supplying SK Hynix’s HBM to the MTIA platform. Additionally, the two companies discussed optimizing wearable devices using SK Hynix’s low-power DRAM and NAND to maximize services for Meta’s AI Glass, a key application in South Korea, and building a dedicated AI data center for Meta domestically.

On the 11th, he discussed long-term AI memory supply collaboration with Google CEO Sundar Pichai and executives, who are actively building data centers. Both agreed that securing memory is the key bottleneck in AI data center construction and that stabilizing long-term supply is critical, as short-term expansion is difficult. They broadly discussed product supply and investment cooperation plans. During the meeting, SK Hynix proposed expanding collaboration across mid- to long-term AI chip roadmaps, including co-designing customized HBM aligned with Google’s next-generation AI models and TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) roadmaps, as well as cooperation on future HBM4-based TPUs.

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SK Group Chairman Engages US Tech Leaders on AI Chips, source