AMD’s CEO Heads to South Korea to Secure AI Memory Amid Global Chip Race

Leaders don’t just talk tech over Zoom — they fly half‑way around the world to lock in supply chains. That’s exactly what Lisa Su is preparing to do. According to reports, Su is set to visit South Korea on March 18 to sit down with Jay Y. Lee and the CEO of Naver in what’s shaping up to be a critical face‑to‑face in the escalating AI memory chip race.

At the center of this trip? High‑bandwidth memory (HBM) — the ultra‑fast memory that AI accelerators from AMD, Nvidia and others depend on to train and run large models and power data centers. With global demand for memory technologies like HBM, DRAM and NAND exploding, securing stable supplies has become a strategic imperative for AI infrastructure builders.

Samsung has long been one of the world’s biggest producers of advanced memory chips. But global supply chains are under pressure, and competitors from SK Hynix and Micron Technology are aggressively vying for AI memory dominance too. That puts companies like AMD in a tough spot: they need guaranteed access to next‑generation memory at scale if they want to compete with market leaders like Nvidia.

Su’s South Korea visit is about more than just supply contracts. Meetings with Samsung and Naver are expected to also cover broader cooperation on data center chips, sovereign AI infrastructure, and next‑gen computing technologies — a clear signal that AMD wants deeper, long‑term strategic ties in Asia, not just one‑off memory deals.

Importantly, this trip coincides with Nvidia’s annual GTC developer conference in California — timing that underscores just how fiercely competitive the AI hardware landscape has become. As memory demand surges and supply chains tighten, chipmakers are racing not just on performance but on partnerships and production security.

In other words: the future of AI compute isn’t just about algorithms and GPUs any more — it’s about who controls the memory that makes those machines run. And AMD’s CEO heading to Korea signals that supply chain strategy may be the next big frontier in the AI arms race.