Lee Jae-yong and Zuckerberg Dinner at Samsung Guesthouse 'Seungjiwon'... Accelerating the 'AI Semiconductor Alliance'

Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong met with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, on the evening of the 28th at Seungjiwon in Hannam-dong, Seoul. The two are Harvard University alumni and have maintained a long-standing friendship. It is reported that Chairman Lee invited CEO Zuckerberg to Seungjiwon, Samsung Electronics' 'guesthouse.'

At around 5:40 PM that day, the Genesis carrying Chairman Lee entered Seungjiwon. Then, at around 6:17 PM, the Staria carrying CEO Zuckerberg arrived.

They are scheduled to discuss cooperation on artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductors and extended reality (XR) during the dinner.

Meta is developing a large language model (LLM) called 'LLaMA 3.' From Samsung Electronics' perspective, this presents an opportunity to secure Meta as a foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing) customer. Samsung Electronics may also produce Meta's proprietary AI semiconductors required to operate LLaMA 3.

A vehicle presumed to be carrying Lee Jae-yong, Vice Chairman of Samsung Electronics, is entering Seungjiwon in Hannam-dong, Yongsan-gu, Seoul on the afternoon of the 28th.
[Photo by Moon Chae-seok]

There is also a possibility that discussions on XR device manufacturing and development cooperation took place. In October 2022, CEO Zuckerberg met with Han Jong-hee, Vice Chairman and Head of Samsung Electronics' Device eXperience (DX) Division, and Roh Tae-moon, President and Head of the Mobile eXperience (MX) Business, at Samsung Research America in Silicon Valley to discuss related cooperation plans.

Meta entered the XR device market in 2014. At the end of last year, it released the latest MR headset, 'Quest 3.' Recently, Apple launched its MR headset 'Vision Pro,' intensifying competition in the XR device market.

Meta's goal is to build an ecosystem for artificial general intelligence (AGI) technology with human-level or higher intelligence. To achieve this, it is constructing an $800 million AI data center in Indiana, USA.

Meta plans to secure an additional 350,000 NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) H100 within this year. It is in urgent need of high-quality AI semiconductor chips.

CEO Zuckerberg will also have an AI-related meeting with President Yoon Seok-youl the following day. The day before, he met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to discuss AI cooperation measures.

It is expected that President Yoon will express the government's intention to expand investment in advanced technology fields such as AI semiconductors during his meeting with CEO Zuckerberg and request collaboration with domestic companies.