SK hynix CEO to meet Gates, Nadella on AI chip ties

SK hynix CEO to meet Gates, Nadella on AI chip ties

SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung will meet Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella this week at the closed-door Microsoft CEO Summit 2026 in Redmond, Washington.

His attendance, industry sources said Tuesday, signals the Korean memory chip-maker has become central to Microsoft’s push toward AI infrastructure less reliant on Nvidia.

The invitation-only summit, running Tuesday through Thursday at Microsoft’s headquarters, gathers about 100 global executives and policymakers for private discussions on generative AI, cloud infrastructure and AI data centers. Kwak, who also attended in 2024, is expected to attend a formal dinner hosted by Gates at his private residence, an event recently revived after a hiatus.

LG Uplus CEO Hong Beom-sik is the only other South Korean telecom or ICT executive reported to be present.

The repeat invitation reflects how deeply SK hynix has embedded itself in Microsoft’s custom-silicon strategy. In January, the Korean firm was named sole supplier of fifth-generation high-bandwidth memory, or HBM3E, for Maia 200, Microsoft’s first in-house AI inference accelerator. Each chip carries six 12-layer 36-gigabyte stacks for 216 gigabytes of total capacity at 7 terabytes per second of bandwidth, the kind of throughput needed to keep large AI models running without stalling.

Microsoft has deployed Maia 200 at its Des Moines, Iowa, data center and is expanding to Phoenix, Arizona. Built on TSMC’s 3-nanometer process, the chip delivers 30 percent better performance per dollar than Microsoft’s previous-generation hardware, the company said at its January unveiling.

Hyperscalers, including Google, Amazon Web Services and Meta, have all developed in-house AI chips to ease their reliance on Nvidia GPUs, which remain expensive and supply-constrained. The trend has broadened the customer base for Korean memory suppliers, since most custom accelerators still depend on HBM. SK hynix held 57 percent of the global HBM market by revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to Counterpoint Research.

The company already supplies DRAM and NAND flash to Microsoft, ships HBM for Nvidia’s GPUs, and is expanding ties with Google and AWS.

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SK hynix CEO to meet Gates, Nadella on AI chip ties, source