SK chairman talks AI, chips with CEOs of Amazon, Intel

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, right, poses with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger at the U.S. chipmaker's headquarters in San Jose, California. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won continued to meet with U.S. IT big shots, discussing AI and chips with Amazon CEO Andrew Jessy and Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger.

The meetings follow talks with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last week.

Photos of him with Jessy and Gelsinger at their respective headquarters in Seattle and San Jose were uploaded on his Instagram account Monday along with the one of him with Kim Young-han, CEO of Gauss Lab, an AI startup subsidiary of SK hynix.

"We have to take 100 steps and 1,000 steps to walk in pace while they shake up the world with tremendous power and speed," Chey wrote in the post.

Chey's meeting with The Amazon chief centered on a possible partnership in AI chips, according to SK Group on Monday.

Amazon is expanding its business scope to develop its own AI chips such as Trainium and Inferentia, which are in need of high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that SK hynix is an industry leader in.

The partnership between SK and Intel goes back to 2022 when SK hynix and the U.S. chipmaker collaborated to develop a server dynamic random-access memory chip able to process 8GB of data per second.

"By having conversations with leaders of all aspects of AI from chip to service, [Chey] set up more a detailed direction for SK's AI strategy and ways to fortify its competitiveness," SK Group said.

During the two-day strategic meeting on June 28 and 29, SK Group pledged to secure 80 trillion won through 2026 to invest in AI and chips.

BY JIN EUN-SOO [jin.eunsoo@joongang.co.kr]