Lee Jae-yong, chairman of Samsung Electronics, returned to Korea on the 31st after a business trip to the United States. He reportedly remained in Washington after the conclusion of the South Korea-U.S. summit on the 24th as part of the economic delegation to hold business meetings.
He arrived at Incheon International Airport around 1:16 a.m. on the same day. When asked by reporters about his impressions of the trip and the U.S. regulations on the export of semiconductor equipment to China, he simply replied, "We have to work hard."
On the 29th (local time), the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it would abolish the "Validated End User (VEU)" system, which granted approval to allied semiconductor corporations operating semiconductor production facilities in China. VEU is a type of comprehensive permit that allows exports of designated items only to companies pre-approved by the U.S. government. As a result, Samsung Electronics and SK hynix will have to obtain approvals on a case-by-case basis when importing U.S. or U.S. technology equipment into their factories in China.
On the same day, when asked whether the supply of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) from NVIDIA had begun, he did not respond. He caught attention during the South Korea-U.S. business roundtable held in conjunction with the summit, where he greeted Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, with a hug.
In this regard, Kim Yong-beom, director of the Presidential Policy Office, explained in a local briefing that "discussions were held about SK and Samsung providing semiconductor chips optimized for NVIDIA supercomputers," adding that this reconfirmed the potential for cooperation between the two countries in the AI industry.