Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong delivers a welcoming address at a national briefing on advanced industry development in the Chungcheong region, held in Asan on Thursday under the chairmanship of President Lee Jae Myung. [Yonhap]
Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong delivers a welcoming address at a national briefing on advanced industry development in the Chungcheong region, held in Asan on Thursday under the chairmanship of President Lee Jae Myung. [Yonhap]

Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong is expected to attend the Sun Valley Conference, the exclusive annual gathering in Idaho that draws billionaires and business leaders from around the world. Having returned to the event last year after a nine-year absence, Lee is set to attend for a second consecutive year and hold a series of meetings with top figures from the global technology and media industries.

His profile at the conference is expected to be particularly elevated this year, reflecting his standing as a key node in the AI-era supply chain. As the head of the world's largest memory chip maker, Lee is likely to field continued demand for Samsung's memory products.

The CEOs of Google, Anthropic and Meta — all companies actively discussing AI chip foundry production with Samsung — are also expected to attend, raising the prospect that collaboration with those firms could take on a more concrete shape. Analysts note that Samsung Electronics is also gaining ground in the application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, market.

According to industry sources, the Sun Valley Conference is scheduled to run Tuesday through Saturday at the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho. Formally known as the Allen & Co. Conference, the invitation-only event has been hosted every July since 1983 by the American investment firm Allen & Company.

The conference has long drawn prominent figures from the global technology and media industries, and this year's edition is again expected to attract major names from the big-tech world.

Foreign media reports indicate that Apple CEO Tim Cook and his designated successor, Senior Vice President John Ternus, will attend together. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai have also been invited, according to reports. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is also expected to attend.

Several founders of leading AI service companies are also set to attend. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Palantir CEO Alex Karp are among those heading to Sun Valley.

Lee attended the Sun Valley Conference almost every year from his first invitation in 2002, when he held the title of junior executive, through 2016. He used the gathering as a primary venue for discussing business cooperation, given the rare opportunity it provides to build relationships with the world's top corporate leaders.

Lee has spoken directly about the conference's importance. Testifying in court in 2017 during the influence-peddling scandal, he called Sun Valley "the busiest and most important business trip of the year." His attendance became sporadic from 2017 onward, however, as legal risks mounted.

Lee returned to the conference last year after a long absence, with his attendance after nine years drawing wide attention. He was accompanied by Lee Won-jin, then head of Samsung's global marketing division and now president of the Visual Display business unit, and used the trip to explore opportunities for AI business cooperation and new ventures.

This year, analysts expect Lee's standing at the conference to rise further as the shortage of AI semiconductors deepens. Cloud service providers operating AI data centers — Amazon, Google and Meta among them — have been snapping up Samsung's memory chips. Those same companies have been named as candidates for long-term memory supply agreements this year, which would give Samsung a more stable revenue base through binding contracts.

In fact, many Sun Valley attendees are among Samsung Electronics' most important customers. Apple, Alphabet and Amazon were all among Samsung's top five customers in the first quarter, meaning Lee will have the rare opportunity to meet them all in one place. Apple, which sources memory chips for the iPhone from Samsung, has long been one of the company's largest revenue contributors.

Lee's attendance is also fueling expectations that Samsung's foundry business could accelerate its recovery. He will have the opportunity to meet directly with the CEOs of Anthropic, Meta and Google — all companies currently in active discussions with Samsung over chip orders.

Samsung's foundry division has recently been in talks with Anthropic, which has begun developing its own AI chips, over production arrangements. Meta is also said to be considering entrusting Samsung's foundry with production of the third generation of its MTIA AI accelerator chip; the first and second generations were manufactured by TSMC. Separately, the possibility of Samsung winning an order for a key component of Google's next-generation tensor processing unit, or TPU, was raised last month.

Samsung is waging an aggressive campaign to win orders from big-tech clients, led by its Taylor, Texas fabrication plant, which is equipped with a cutting-edge 2-nanometer process. Construction on the Taylor fab began in 2022, and it is currently in a trial-operation phase, with full-scale mass production scheduled to begin next year.


jeongwan@heraldcorp.com