SK Chairman Chey Tae-won Holds Lunch Meeting With OpenAI's Sam Altman, Joined by SK Hynix and SK Telecom Executives

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won met with OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman over lunch during Altman's visit to South Korea, in what appeared to be in-depth talks on strengthening their AI alliance.

According to business circles on Oct. 31, Chey and Altman held the luncheon meeting at an undisclosed location in Seoul. Senior executives from major SK Group affiliates, including SK Hynix and SK Telecom, were also reported to have attended.

The specific contents of the discussion were not disclosed. The two sides are believed to have focused on ways to further solidify their existing strategic partnership, including cooperation in the high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, supply chain and the construction of next-generation AI data centers.

SK Group and OpenAI signed a strategic partnership in October last year at SK's headquarters in Seoul's Seorin-dong to build global AI infrastructure. At the time, they signed a letter of intent on memory supply and a memorandum of understanding on cooperation for an AI data center in South Korea's southwest region. They also agreed to cooperate on Stargate, OpenAI's large-scale AI infrastructure project.

In line with that effort, SK Hynix has been focused on establishing a mass-production system to respond stably to OpenAI's large-scale HBM supply request, which at the time was as much as 900,000 D-RAM wafers a month. SK Telecom has also been working with OpenAI to jointly build an AI data center in South Korea's southwest region, while cooperating on next-generation data center technologies and the development of B2B and B2C AI services.

Chey and Altman also met at the AI Summit in San Francisco in July. Their latest meeting during Altman's South Korea visit underscores continued cooperation as the two sides pursue leadership in the global AI ecosystem.

Han Kyung-woo, Hankyung.com reporter case@hankyung.com