Su expected to arrive Tuesday evening

Meetings with NPU firms, Ministry of Science and ICT planned for Wednesday

AMD CEO to engage Korean gaming community directly

Met Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong in March to discuss AI computing cooperation

Samsung Electronics named preferred HBM4 supplier for next-generation MI455X accelerator

Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong (right) poses for a photo with AMD CEO Lisa Su before a dinner at Seungji-won in Itaewon-dong, Seoul, in March. [Samsung Electronics]
Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong (right) poses for a photo with AMD CEO Lisa Su before a dinner at Seungji-won in Itaewon-dong, Seoul, in March. [Samsung Electronics]

Lisa Su, CEO of AMD — widely seen as Nvidia's closest rival in the global AI chip market — is returning to South Korea for the first time in seven months since her March visit. Her schedule includes meetings with key players in South Korea's AI chip ecosystem and the government, with industry watchers closely following whether the trip will yield further cooperation with Samsung Electronics.

As the spread of AI agents amplifies the importance of memory chips, AI chip companies have been courting South Korean memory makers with growing urgency. During Su's March visit, AMD and Samsung Electronics signed an MOU to deepen cooperation in next-generation AI memory.

Su is expected to arrive as early as Tuesday evening, according to industry sources. Her official schedule kicks off Wednesday morning with a roundtable meeting with domestic NPU companies.

The CEOs of South Korean AI fabless firms — including Furiosa AI, DeepX and Mobilint — are among those expected to attend. Specific avenues for cooperation between AMD and South Korean AI chip companies are expected to be discussed at the meeting.

A meeting with the Ministry of Science and ICT is also being arranged. Su met Deputy Prime Minister and Science and ICT Minister Bae Kyung-hoon in July, when the two sides agreed to pursue the development and demonstration of a heterogeneous AI computing infrastructure linking CPUs and GPUs with domestically developed AI chips, or NPUs.

Later Wednesday afternoon, Su is scheduled to attend the "AMD Gamer Day" event at Seoul Dragon City, where she will meet South Korea's gaming community.

The most closely watched question, however, is whether Su will hold an additional meeting with Samsung Electronics. During her March visit, she met Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong at Seungji-won in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, to discuss cooperation in the AI chip sector.

Before that dinner, she also met Vice Chairman Jeon Young-hyun, head of Samsung Electronics' Device Solutions division, and signed an MOU to expand collaboration in next-generation AI memory and computing technology.

At that meeting, Samsung Electronics was designated as the preferred supplier of sixth-generation HBM — HBM4 — for AMD's next-generation AI accelerator, the Instinct MI455X.

The MI455X will be equipped with 432 gigabytes of HBM4, 50 percent more than the 288 gigabytes of HBM4 planned for Nvidia's next-generation AI GPU, Rubin. The strategy aims to expand storage capacity for AI models and data while reducing the burden of data movement through high-capacity memory.

Samsung Electronics began mass-producing and shipping its highest-performance HBM4 — based on 1c (sixth-generation 10-nanometer-class) DRAM and a 4-nanometer base die — in February, the first in the industry to do so, strengthening its ties with AMD and other global AI chip companies.

The two companies' cooperation extends beyond HBM for GPUs to server memory as well. Samsung Electronics has also agreed to collaborate on high-performance DDR5 memory to boost the performance of Helios, a rack-scale AI server platform built around AMD's sixth-generation server CPU, EPYC.

At the time, Samsung Electronics also agreed to discuss foundry cooperation for the contract manufacturing of AMD's next-generation chips. The company plans to continue expanding its partnerships with global big tech firms by leveraging its strengths in turnkey solutions spanning memory, foundry and packaging.

However, some in the industry expect no major announcements from this visit, noting that Lee and other senior Samsung Electronics executives have already met with Su frequently during their own trips to the United States. Su is also not expected to stay long in South Korea due to scheduling constraints.


jeongwan@heraldcorp.com