Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong is seeking to hold a meeting with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang in the United States at the end of this month. Following last month’s announcement of the “Three Mega Projects for Korea’s Great Leap Forward,” they are expected to discuss cooperation plans related to newly promoted large-scale investments, including the Gwangju semiconductor plant (fab).

According to business circles on the 9th, Chairman Lee is reportedly coordinating his schedule to meet CEO Huang in Silicon Valley in the United States at the end of this month. If an official meeting between Lee and Huang is realized, it will be the first in nine months since their so‑called “chimaek (chicken and beer) meeting” held on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in October last year. At that time, Lee and Huang, together with Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Eui-sun, formed a “Kkanbu (close ally) alliance” at the “Kkanbu Chicken” outlet in Gangnam-gu, Seoul.

This meeting is drawing particular attention as it is being pursued after the announcement on May 29 of the “Three Mega Projects for Korea’s Great Leap Forward” by Samsung and SK together with the government. Synergy with NVIDIA is seen as a decisive factor for the success or failure of building the KRW 800 trillion Gwangju fab and AI data centers nationwide with a total investment exceeding KRW 1,000 trillion.

For the Korean semiconductor industry’s planned Gwangju fab and the Gyeonggi Yongin semiconductor cluster to successfully take root, it is necessary to increase the share of supplies to NVIDIA. For AI data centers, securing NVIDIA’s AI chips is essential for building servers. NVIDIA’s AI accelerators are currently in short supply, with big tech companies lining up to place orders. Domestic companies last October achieved the result of securing 260,000 NVIDIA AI chips, catalyzed by a meeting between President Lee Jae-myung and CEO Huang.

The increasingly close partnership between Samsung Electronics and NVIDIA is also a key point of interest. The two companies are strengthening cooperation not only in memory semiconductors (Samsung Electronics) and graphics processing units (GPUs, NVIDIA), but also in foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing). Samsung Electronics is contract-manufacturing Groq3, the language processing unit (LPU) from NVIDIA’s partner Groq. In addition, as Samsung Electronics at the end of May supplied its customers, including NVIDIA, with samples of HBM4E, the seventh generation of high bandwidth memory (HBM), as a world first, expectations are rising that cooperation will accelerate through product verification and into final mass production.

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