AMD CEO Lisa Su to Visit South Korea in October, Deepening HBM4 and NPU Collaboration
nashnova research
AMD CEO Lisa Su is expected to return to South Korea around October 8 — just six months after her first visit — meeting AI chip startups, government officials, and Samsung leadership as AMD's Korean semiconductor push moves from signing deals to executing them.
Two visits in six months — why the urgency?
Su signed multiple MOUs during her March trip. A return visit in October is far faster than the typical CEO travel cycle.
This means → AMD sees its Korean supply-chain window narrowing and wants to push agreements from paper to action in person.
The itinerary runs three tracks in parallel — startups, government, and Samsung — not a courtesy call.
What does the NPU cooperation actually involve?
Su will meet executives from three Korean NPU — neural processing unit, a chip purpose-built for AI inference — startups: Rebellions, DeepX, and Mobilint.
The backdrop: in July 2026, South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT and AMD signed an MOU to co-build AI computing infrastructure combining AMD CPUs and GPUs with Korean-made NPUs.
In plain terms = AMD supplies the big chips, Korea supplies the specialist small chips, and together they assemble a full AI compute stack — plus a research base and talent training on Korean soil.
How far could the Samsung partnership extend beyond memory?
During the March visit, Samsung was named the preferred supplier of HBM4 — sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory — for AMD's next-gen Instinct MI455X AI accelerator.
The two sides also agreed to co-develop DDR5 solutions for AMD's next-gen EPYC processors and the Helios rack-scale AI platform.
This means → Samsung currently holds the "memory supplier" seat. Industry observers say that if the partnership expands into foundry and advanced packaging, Samsung could capture memory, foundry, and packaging orders simultaneously — a step-change in its strategic position inside AMD's supply chain.
What signal matters most from this trip?
Su will also meet South Korea's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT, Bae Kyung-hoon, underscoring the government-level push behind the partnership.
In plain terms = when a country's deputy prime minister sits across the table, the cooperation is not just commercial — national industrial policy is driving it.
The key test: whether AMD and Samsung can advance their relationship from a memory agreement to substantive foundry-and-packaging commitments — that decides whether Samsung ends up as "one of AMD's suppliers" or a strategic-tier partner.
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