Korea's top biz leaders to meet Nvidia CEO in US

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, left, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang share fried chicken and snacks with people outside a Kkanbu Chicken restaurant in Samseong-dong in Seoul's Gangnam District, June 7. Yonhap

By Ko Dong-hwan

• Published Jul 22, 2026 4:25 PM KST

Meeting to reconfirm AI market's robust growth

The heads of Korean firms Samsung Electronics, SK Group and Naver are expected to meet with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Silicon Valley in the United States this week, marking a rare gathering of global artificial intelligence (AI) industry leaders.

A roundtable-style meeting between Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Lee Jae-yong, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, Naver Board Chair Lee Hae-jin and Huang is expected to take place on Friday (local time), with discussions expected to focus on ways to strengthen cooperation in memory chips, graphics processing unit (GPU) infrastructure and generative AI services amid growing demand for AI technologies.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are also expected to attend, further elevating the significance of the meeting.

If confirmed, the gathering would be unprecedented, bringing together leaders of the world's two largest memory chipmakers, Samsung Electronics and SK Group's SK hynix, AI chip leader Nvidia, and generative AI developers Naver, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Just over a month ago, Huang visited Korea and held separate meetings with leaders from Samsung, SK, Hyundai, LG and Naver. This upcoming gathering in the U.S. reaffirms Nvidia’s commitment to strengthening partnerships with Korean firms that are now seen not just as memory suppliers but as essential partners in the global AI infrastructure ecosystem.

Samsung Electronics and SK hynix already supply high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and other advanced memory products to Nvidia. HBM4 chips from Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are slated for inclusion in Nvidia’s next-generation AI accelerator, Vera Rubin, which is expected for market launch in the second half of this year.

Samsung and SK are also memory suppliers for OpenAI’s proprietary AI chips and signed an agreement last year to provide high-performance memory for Stargate, a multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure project.

Beyond memory, collaboration in foundry services is also expanding. Samsung is producing Nvidia’s inference-focused language processing unit, Grok 3, and is currently in talks with Anthropic to manufacture AI chips using its 2-nanometer process. This reflects a broader trend of Korean firms playing increasingly strategic roles across the AI value chain.

Naver is expected to discuss cooperation on its “AI factory” initiative which integrates GPU servers, data centers and power/cooling infrastructure with AI models and cloud technology to support large-scale AI computation. Industry observers suggest the meeting could also help allay recent concerns about a potential AI peak-out as demand for AI infrastructure remains robust and memory shortages are projected to persist into 2027.

With leaders from the memory, GPU and generative AI sectors convening in one place, this summit is poised to signal a new phase of strategic alignment in the global AI market, in which Korean companies are positioned as core enablers of the AI era.

Industry observers believe the meeting is likely to send a strong signal to the market that AI demand and investment capacity will remain robust over the next two to three years, going beyond simply reinforcing cooperation on AI infrastructure.

Some industry executives noted that with stock prices having fallen by double digits from their highs, the summit could help ease peak-out fears if it leads to a more concrete road map for AI infrastructure investment and clearer directions for collaboration.