Korean and American technology giants gathered in San Francisco, and Samsung and Hynix signed high-value orders of US$950 billion
On July 24, local time, the San Francisco Artificial Intelligence Summit was held. South Korean President Lee Jae-myung attended the meeting. Business leaders from South Korea and the United States who attended the meeting included Samsung Electronics CEO Lee Jae-yong, SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won, Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chairman Chung Eui-sun, Naver founder Lee Hae-jin, as well as Nvidia CEO Huang Jen-Hsun, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Amodei, Broadcom CEO Chen Fuyang and other American technology giant executives.
On July 24, local time, the San Francisco Artificial Intelligence Summit was held. South Korean President Lee Jae-myung attended the meeting. Business leaders from South Korea and the United States who attended the meeting included Samsung Electronics CEO Lee Jae-yong, SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won, Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chairman Chung Eui-sun, Naver founder Lee Hae-jin, as well as Nvidia CEO Huang Jen-Hsun, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Amodei, Broadcom CEO Chen Fuyang and other American technology giant executives. According to South Korean officials, about 150 business executives, investors, researchers and startup founders attended the summit. Kim Yong-beom, director of the Policy Office of the South Korean Presidential Office, announced in San Francisco, the United States, that Samsung Electronics and Broadcom formally signed a memorandum of understanding on business cooperation, planning to carry out wafer foundry cooperation around the supply of advanced storage semiconductors and AI chip manufacturing with a scale of US$200 billion (approximately 1.36 trillion yuan) in the next five years. On the same day, SK Group announced that it would supply chips worth US$750 billion (approximately 5.09 trillion yuan) to U.S. technology companies such as Nvidia. The overall chip cooperation project scale between Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and U.S. technology giants reached 1,375 trillion won. According to the memorandum, Samsung Electronics will provide advanced storage semiconductors to Broadcom and open its foundry capacity to participate in AI chip manufacturing. As a major global supplier of network chips, customized AI accelerators and semiconductor solutions, Broadcom's customers cover the fields of cloud computing and data centers. This cooperation means that Samsung will not only supply key storage devices such as HBM, but will also directly intervene in the production of AI inference and training chips customized by Broadcom for cloud manufacturers. At the same time, Nvidia officially announced a long-term partnership with SK Hynix at the summit to ensure the supply of next-generation memory and jointly develop high-bandwidth memory for AI training, AI agents and physical AI applications. Huang Renxun revealed that SK Telecom will use Nvidia Vera Rubin chips and SK Hynix HBM4 memory to build a 2-gigawatt (GW)-level data center. The first facility is scheduled to go online in 2027. Nvidia pointed out that the total value of the artificial intelligence plan in cooperation with SK Group will exceed US$500 billion. In addition, Huang Renxun also announced the joint development of self-driving cars with Hyundai Motor. Anthropic CEO Amoudi announced the signing of supply agreements with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and will sign a memorandum of understanding on AI security and network security industry cooperation with the Ministry of Science and Technology of South Korea. Kim Yong-beom told the media before leaving for the United States on Thursday that the presidential visit played a "catalyst" role in helping Korean companies complete long-running negotiations with their American partners. South Korea announced an $880 billion investment plan last month, which is jointly supported by companies such as SK Hynix, Naver and Samsung Electronics. It aims to consolidate South Korea's leading position in the field of artificial intelligence by vigorously expanding chip production, building data centers and developing physical artificial intelligence. Kim Yong-beom said Lee Jae-myung's visit is expected to translate many of the investment plans announced last month into concrete projects. More than half of the approximately 8 GW of AI data center capacity planned by the South Korean government in the first phase will be implemented during this visit. Unlike previous announcements, which mainly reflected preliminary investment intentions, the new project will identify specific customers, construction locations, and Korean engineering partners participating in the project. Earlier this month, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Samsung and SK Hynix to expand memory chip production capacity in the United States. Kim Yong-beom said that it is natural for the U.S. Secretary of Commerce to encourage companies to expand local manufacturing, but Washington has not officially required Korean companies to further increase semiconductor investment in the United States. He added that South Korea's latest round of domestic capacity expansion was mainly driven by strong demand from U.S. technology companies, which accounted for 80% to 90% of related orders.