Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won shake hands at Cheong Wa Dae on June 29 during a national briefing on three major megaprojects presided over by President Lee Jae Myung. [Yonhap]
Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won shake hands at Cheong Wa Dae on June 29 during a national briefing on three major megaprojects presided over by President Lee Jae Myung. [Yonhap]

Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won are set to meet global big-tech CEOs in Sicily, Italy, following their recent engagements in San Francisco. The two are expected to attend a private gathering hosted by Google to discuss expanding AI cooperation.

According to business circles Monday, Lee and Chey plan to attend Google Camp, a closed-door annual gathering of global CEOs, to be held in Sicily later this month.

Google Camp is an event organized each summer by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It takes place at the Rocco Forte Verdura Golf Resort in southern Sicily, and both the attendee list and agenda are kept strictly private.

Among Korean executives, Lee has consistently attended since the event's early years, while Chey participated in the 2024 edition. Last year, both missed the event due to US-bound schedules as South Korea-US tariff negotiations entered their final stages.

Business circles expect the two chairmen to use the event to strengthen ties with Google and other global big-tech CEOs, and to explore cooperation in AI, semiconductors and data centers.

The prospect carries added weight given that Samsung Electronics and SK Group recently agreed at the San Francisco AI Summit to cooperate with Nvidia and Broadcom on memory chips and AI data centers in deals totaling $950 billion. Further discussions along those lines are seen as likely at Google Camp.

With AI investment expanding rapidly, surging demand for HBM is also expected to prompt global big-tech firms to press Korean chipmakers for greater semiconductor supply.

Business circles view Lee and Chey's continued engagement with global AI partners in Europe — following their US activities — as a demonstration of Korean companies' competitiveness and growing stature in the AI arena.

Earlier, at the San Francisco AI Summit, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, "Without the HBM innovation from Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, Nvidia could not have built supercomputers," adding, "This is truly Korea's golden age."


kacew@heraldcorp.com