Samsung Group Chairman Lee Jae-yong seeks opportunities for artificial intelligence (AI) business cooperation with big tech giants in the U.S. and shares wisdom to respond to the Trump 2.0 period.
According to a business official on the 9th, Chairman Lee arrived at Sun Valley Lodge, Idaho, where the “Sun Valley Conference” will be held late on the afternoon of the 8th (local time) and began his personal schedule, including a one-on-one meeting. The Sun Valley Conference, which begins every year on Tuesday immediately after U.S. Independence Day on July 4, is called the “summer camp of billionaires.” It is a private gathering in New York where corporate CEOs, financiers, politicians, and journalists gather to enjoy outdoor activities and talk about the topic at hand, invited by Allen & Company, which is in charge of private investment for the wealthy. Chairman Lee attended the event every year after he was first invited to the event in 2002, but since 2017, he has been caught up in the state affairs manipulation scandal and stopped attending. As a result, attention is being paid to whether Chairman Lee will speed up global on-site management using human networks in the wake of his attendance at the Sun Valley Conference.
This year, a large number of U.S. tech giants will attend, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Chairman Lee is expected to exchange strategies and management ideas to respond to the AI era through one-on-one meetings with them. Since Apple, Amazon, and Google are all designing and developing AI semiconductors on their own, detailed discussions can also be made on cooperation with Samsung Electronics’ foundry division that can produce them.
The tariff policy that U.S. President Donald Trump will carry out for the rest of his term and the strategy to respond to it are also expected to be one of Chairman Lee’s interests in visiting Sun Valley. In particular, Samsung Electronics could be a direct target in the case of semiconductor item tariffs that President Trump has vowed to announce soon. It is also expected to share opinions on government subsidies for semiconductor plants and R&D complexes that Samsung Electronics is building in Taylor City, Texas. Samsung Electronics is directly affected by U.S. tariffs and sanctions on advanced semiconductors with China.
In addition, foreign media analyzed that the situation in the energy and defense sectors will also be a key discourse among billionaires gathered at this year’s Sun Valley Conference. In particular, defense-related investments and strategies in line with changes in geopolitical tensions will be an important point of discussion. Samsung Group, led by Chairman Lee, is also expected to get an idea as it has an inseparable relationship with energy price trends and changes in geopolitical dynamics.
It is also expected that Chairman Lee will actively seek to find new growth engines in the wake of his attendance at the conference. Samsung Group recently added AI and healthcare companies to its M&A portfolio. Analysts say that Chairman Lee can speed up decision-making on new businesses or M&A by interacting with various political and business figures at the Sun Valley Conference and listening to various views on new growth engines.
In particular, the industry analyzes that Chairman Lee’s attendance at the Sun Valley Conference means a lot just by human networking with big tech giants. For example, conversations with Altman CEO and Nadella CEO can provide direct information about the direction of development of high bandwidth memory (HBM) or large language model (LLM) semiconductors. In addition, through cooperation with global companies, new supply chains can be established together, joint R&D, and investment partnerships can be coordinated. An industry official said, “A large-scale merger or partnership is difficult to decide unless it is group presidential networking,” adding, “This is where the difference between companies with and without heads who are responsible for the future of the company is seen.”
[Kim Dongeun is a reporter]
