Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) Chairman Jay Y. Lee departed for the United States by private jet from the Seoul Gimpo Business Aviation Center (SGBAC) on Sunday afternoon to attend the Sun Valley Conference, dubbed the "summer camp for billionaires." Attention is focused on whether he will discuss expanding artificial intelligence (AI) chip cooperation and long-term agreements (LTAs) with the CEOs of global Big Tech firms.
The Sun Valley Conference is a closed-door event hosted annually in July since 1983 by U.S. investment bank Allen & Company. It is regarded as a venue where global Big Tech executives and media and investment industry heavyweights gather to discuss strategic partnerships and mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Lee is known to have attended the conference every year from 2002, when he was an executive vice president at Samsung Electronics, until 2016.
This year's Sun Valley Conference will open Monday at the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho and run through the 11th.
Attending the event for a second consecutive year after last year, Lee is expected to meet with global Big Tech leaders including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
Industry observers say that global Big Tech leaders, with Lee at the center, will likely discuss expanding memory chip supply and cooperation on foundry (contract chip manufacturing).
Samsung Electronics has recently signed a series of long-term agreements (LTAs) with global Big Tech firms to supply memory for AI, fundamentally changing the profit structure of its memory business, which had been sensitive to economic cycles. LTAs are typically signed on binding terms that maintain contracts for three to five years, allowing stable profits to be secured even when DRAM prices decline.
Lee is expected to engage in LTA discussions for AI memory supply at this Sun Valley Conference. As LTAs accounted for about 30% of the memory supply contracts Samsung Electronics signed in the second quarter of this year, there is a possibility that the share could expand to around 40% following these talks.
After securing Tesla and IBM as clients, Samsung Electronics' foundry division has recently been reviewing contracts with Anthropic and Meta to manufacture next-generation AI chips, accelerating its expansion of Big Tech clients. There is also a possibility of cooperation at this Sun Valley Conference with Amazon and Google, which develop their own application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).
A Samsung Electronics official said, "We cannot confirm the chairman's schedule."
