AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su, widely regarded as a rival to Nvidia in the artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor market, is visiting South Korea once again after seven months.

Following her first visit in March, during which she expanded cooperation touchpoints with domestic companies and the government—including Samsung Electronics, Naver, and Upstage—attention is focused on whether this visit will further expand the alliance with South Korea's AI semiconductor ecosystem.

According to industry sources on the 7th, AMD CEO Lisa Su will attend a meeting with domestic neural processing unit (NPU) companies this morning, followed by the "AMD Gamer Day" event in the afternoon at Dragon City in Yongsan-gu, Seoul.

Senior Vice President Jack Huynh will also attend the event alongside CEO Lisa Su, and a doorstepping session is scheduled immediately after the event where CEO Su will answer questions from the press.

AMD is a comprehensive semiconductor company that produces both central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), and is recognized as a major supplier alongside Nvidia in the global AI semiconductor market.

While building an open ecosystem based on its open-source software platform "ROCm," AMD is also a founding member that led the launch of "UALink," an ultra-fast AI semiconductor connection standard, alongside companies such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft (MS).

Cooperation between AMD and South Korea gained full momentum following CEO Lisa Su's first visit to the country since taking office last March.

At the time, CEO Su met with Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong at Seungjiwon and also held a separate meeting with Samsung Electronics CEO Jeon Young-hyun.

During that visit, Samsung Electronics was designated as a preferred supplier of high-bandwidth memory (HBM4) to be mounted on AMD's next-generation AI accelerator "Instinct" series, formalizing memory cooperation between the two companies.

During the same visit, CEO Su also visited 1784, Naver's second headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, to meet with Naver CEO Choi Sue-yeon and sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for "ecosystem expansion and next-generation infrastructure cooperation."

She also met with Upstage CEO Kim Sung-hun to discuss the supply and large-scale introduction of AMD's latest GPUs, broadening the scope of cooperation to domestic AI startups.

Discussions with the government continued as well.

CEO Su met sequentially with Ha Jung-woo, then Senior Presidential Secretary for AI and Future Planning, and Lim Moon-young, Vice Chairperson of the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy Committee, to discuss the "AI Top 3" strategy and ways to build an open global AI ecosystem.

Separately, in July in San Francisco, she met with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT Bae Kyung-hoon, agreeing to build and demonstrate a heterogeneous AI computing infrastructure that combines AMD's CPUs and GPUs with domestic neural processing units (NPUs).

Aimed at establishing an integrated computing environment that flexibly combines computing resources according to the characteristics of AI services and fostering an open ecosystem that guarantees the participation of domestic companies, the two sides also agreed to establish a domestic "AI Center of Excellence" to serve as a cooperation hub in this process.

AMD's moves in South Korea—spanning large corporations, startups, and the government—are interpreted as a strategy to diversify its partner ecosystem by simultaneously securing supply chains and a customer base in the domestic AI semiconductor market traditionally dominated by Nvidia.

Industry insiders expect that CEO Su will likely meet with government and domestic corporate figures once again during this visit to explore additional business cooperation measures.

(Photo: Yonhap News)