Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong, Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Eui-sun, and Naver founder and board chair Lee Hae-jin visited Nvidia's headquarters in Silicon Valley and met with Nvidia Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jensen Huang.
On the 24th (local time), Nvidia said these business leaders toured its headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
Chairman Lee, Chairman Chung, and Chair Lee each took commemorative photos with Huang, the Nvidia founder, in the lobby of the headquarters' Endeavor building. The Endeavor building is designed with angular shapes inspired by the triangle, the basic unit of modern computer graphics.
In the photos released by Nvidia, Huang is seen posing separately with Chairman Lee and Chairman Chung, and Chair Lee is shown taking a commemorative photo with Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon and other officials from both companies.
Nvidia did not disclose specific details of the meetings or the discussion agenda. In the industry, there is a view that Chairman Lee and CEO Huang discussed ways to cooperate on high-performance memory, including high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and in the semiconductor foundry (contract manufacturing) sector. Samsung Electronics supplies high-performance memory, including HBM, to Nvidia.
Chairman Chung and CEO Huang were reportedly discussing ways to expand cooperation in physical AI fields such as Autonomous Driving, robots, and AI transformation of manufacturing sites. As Huang had previously referred to Saemangeum in North Jeolla Province, where Hyundai Motor Group plans to invest, as Korea's "AI Valley" and mentioned potential cooperation including data centers, it is interpreted that plans to build AI infrastructure in the Saemangeum area were also discussed.
Naver's leadership, including Chair Lee and CEO Choi Soo-yeon, is believed to have discussed cooperation on AI infrastructure with CEO Huang, including building an AI factory.
An AI factory is a facility that handles large-scale AI computation by combining AI models and cloud technologies with physical infrastructure such as graphics processing unit (GPU) servers, data centers, and power and cooling systems.
With the heads and founders of major domestic corporations visiting Nvidia's headquarters on the same day, there is also talk that comprehensive cooperation plans between Korean corporations and Nvidia may have been discussed in areas such as AI Semiconductor, data centers, Autonomous Driving, and physical AI.
The previous day in Woodside, California, Huang had dinner with SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and discussed ways to expand cooperation in AI infrastructure, semiconductors, and physical AI.