Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are set to announce major memory chip supply agreements with leading U.S. technology companies during South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s visit to San Francisco, a senior presidential official said Thursday.
Kim Yong-beom, the president’s policy adviser, told reporters Thursday that the deals to be unveiled would cover areas including long-term memory chip supply, strategic investment partnerships, and memorandums of understanding with technology partners around the world. “We expect a lot of very large and meaningful figures to be announced,” Kim Yong-beom said, according to Reuters. He declined to disclose specific values ahead of the company announcements.
Kim Yong-beom described President Lee’s visit as a “catalyst” that gave stalled talks between the Korean chipmakers and their American partners the push needed to reach agreement, according to Bloomberg. Global technology companies are also expected to announce strategic investments in artificial intelligence data centers, though Kim Yong-beom did not provide details.
President Lee arrived in San Francisco on Friday for an AI summit, where he is scheduled to hold separate meetings with Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan. Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Jay Y. Lee and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won are among the Korean business leaders attending the summit.
Kim Yong-beom said more than half of the government’s planned roughly 8 gigawatts of first-phase AI data-center capacity is expected to take shape during the visit. In contrast to the earlier, more preliminary announcement, the incoming projects will name the actual customers, locations, and Korean engineering firms involved, according to Bloomberg. He also said U.S. technology companies account for 80% to 90% of the underlying orders driving the latest expansion plans.
Earlier this month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Samsung and SK Hynix to expand memory chip production in the United States. Kim Yong-beom said Washington had issued no formal demands for further semiconductor investment on U.S. soil, framing Lutnick’s remarks as the kind of domestic manufacturing encouragement one would expect from a commerce secretary.
The San Francisco deals build on a run of recent commitments by the two chipmakers. Samsung and SK Hynix pledged a combined 800 trillion won, equivalent to roughly $520 billion, last month to construct new fabrication plants in southwestern South Korea as AI-driven memory demand continues to outpace existing supply capacity. Separately, SK Hynix reached a multi-year technology partnership with Nvidia covering memory supply for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin AI supercomputers and other platforms.