Second meeting this year, following July AI Summit in US

OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman (left) and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won leave after a meeting at The Plaza hotel in Jung-gu, Seoul, in February. [Herald DB]
OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman (left) and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won leave after a meeting at The Plaza hotel in Jung-gu, Seoul, in February. [Herald DB]

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won met with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is visiting South Korea, as the two sides continue to advance cooperative projects they have been pursuing since last year, including HBM supply and AI data center development.

Business circles said Saturday that Chey and Altman shared lunch at an undisclosed location in Seoul. Senior executives from SK hynix and SK Telecom were also in attendance, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The specific topics discussed were not disclosed. Given that SK and OpenAI are already cooperating on memory chip supply and the construction of an AI data center in South Korea, however, industry observers said the two sides likely reviewed the progress of those projects and discussed the direction of future collaboration.

SK Group and OpenAI signed a strategic partnership in October last year to build global AI infrastructure. At the time, the two companies signed a letter of intent on memory chip supply and an MOU on jointly developing an AI data center in the southwestern part of the country, and agreed to cooperate on OpenAI's large-scale AI infrastructure project, Stargate.

SK hynix said it would build out production capacity to handle requests for up to 900,000 HBM wafers per month on a DRAM wafer basis, while SK Telecom is pursuing the joint construction of an AI data center in southwestern South Korea with OpenAI.

Chey and Altman had also met in July at an AI Summit held in San Francisco, where they discussed the long-term direction of cooperation in AI infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Altman also met Saturday with about 50 presidents of Samsung affiliates for a discussion on the theme "The next decade AI will change — choices for companies." Altman presented OpenAI's compact input device, Codex Micro, as a gift and exchanged views on how working styles are changing in the AI era and what it means for corporate competitiveness.


rim@heraldcorp.com