Lisa Su, CEO of U.S. chipmaker AMD, met South Korean government officials, Samsung Electronics and AI startup Upstage on March 19 to discuss AI partnerships. She had met Samsung Chairman Lee Jae-yong the previous day. The meetings focused on strengthening the AI ecosystem and developing sovereign AI models.
Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), met South Korean government officials on March 19 in Seoul. She discussed AI industry cooperation with Im Moon-young, vice chair of the National AI Strategy Committee, and Ha Jung-woo, presidential secretary for AI policy and future planning. Officials introduced policies to position South Korea, Asia's fourth-largest economy, among the world's top three AI powerhouses, and explored synergies with Korean firms and AMD, including joint R&D to boost global competitiveness and build an open global AI ecosystem. Earlier that day, Su met Roh Tae-moon, Samsung Electronics co-CEO for the mobile business, at the company's headquarters in southern Seoul. “There are many topics to discuss,” Su told reporters upon arrival. “We're going to have a good meeting.” Industry watchers expect talks on AI ecosystems for PCs and tablets. Su also met Sung Kim, CEO of AI startup Upstage, to discuss broader AI innovation cooperation. AMD and Upstage have been partners since AMD joined Upstage's 62 billion-won ($41.3 million) Series B bridge investment last year. Under expanded collaboration, Upstage will deploy AMD's Instinct MI355 accelerators over the next year on a multiphase roadmap to enhance large language models (LLMs) and document processing engines. This supports development of a sovereign AI model in the government-led AI foundation model project, where Upstage advanced to the second round alongside SK Telecom and LG AI Research. “Pairing that with domestic infrastructure gives us the foundation to make Korea a genuinely competitive force in global AI,” Kim said. Su stated, “This collaboration brings together AMD Instinct GPUs and the ROCm open software with Upstage's expertise to advance Korea's sovereign AI capabilities, and deliver the performance, efficiency and open ecosystem needed to accelerate AI innovation.” On Wednesday, Su met Samsung Chairman Lee Jae-yong amid efforts to strengthen AI chip ties. Samsung announced an agreement to supply high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips for AMD's next-generation AI accelerators, with an MOU designating it as preferred supplier of HBM4 for the Instinct MI455X GPU.
