SEOUL, October 07 (AJP) - AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su had her own Jensen Huang moment in Korea on Wednesday, hosting a day for gamers and rubbing shoulders with the country’s science minister and business tycoons.
Su appeared alongside Jack Huynh, AMD’s senior vice president and general manager of its Computing and Graphics Group, at AMD Gamer Day in Seoul’s Yongsan district, meeting Korean gamers and outlining the company’s vision for gaming and artificial intelligence.
Her second visit this year, following a March trip, came a month before Nvidia brings AI Day Seoul 2026 to COEX in southern Seoul on Nov. 9 and 10 — putting the two U.S. chip giants’ rivalry on Korean soil.
Nvidia’s two-day event is expected to draw around 2,000 developers, startup representatives, researchers and industry officials, with Samsung Electronics and SK hynix among the participating partners.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, however, is not expected to attend, according to an industry official familiar with the matter.
The back-to-back events underscore South Korea’s growing importance to a contest that extends beyond AI accelerators to the memory chips, supply chains and technology partnerships needed to support them.
Asked by AJP whether competition between AMD and Nvidia was increasingly becoming a race to secure high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, from South Korean suppliers, Su pointed to surging AI demand across the industry.
“The main thing that we see in the market today is that the demand for AI compute continues to go up,” Su said. “When I speak to all of our partners across the supply chain and across the industry, everyone is racing to satisfy that demand.”
“As the demand continues to increase, we’re continuing to work all kinds of avenues to increase our overall supply,” she added.
South Korea sits at the center of that race as home to Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, two of the world’s dominant suppliers of HBM, the advanced memory used in AI accelerators.
Su repeatedly emphasized the importance of both chipmakers during Wednesday’s media session.
“We very much rely on the Korean supply chain,” she said. “Samsung, SK hynix are great partners of ours and very key for us to accomplish our broad ambition in data center.”
She also described Samsung as one of AMD’s “most strategic partners” across memory technologies, including DDR4, DDR5 and HBM. Close coordination with suppliers has become increasingly important as demand rises across AI, gaming and consumer computing, she said.
AMD is seeking to expand its AI accelerator business and challenge Nvidia’s market dominance, making access to HBM increasingly important.
Su described a “very tight supply environment” and said AMD was encouraging its memory partners to expand capacity “as fast as possible.”
AMD is already ramping up systems based on its next-generation MI455 accelerator and HBM4, she said.
“We have gotten great support from both Samsung and SK hynix, and we view the partnerships on HBM not just one generation but really multiple generations,” Su said.
“We’re very happy with HBM4. I think HBM4 is doing extremely well, and we’re ramping it up right now.”
The Korean contest extends beyond memory.
Su said she met Korean AI startups earlier Wednesday and reaffirmed AMD’s plan to establish an AI “center of excellence” in the country while expanding ties with startups and universities.
She named Upstage, MangoBoost and Moreh among Korean companies already working closely with AMD and said she had met additional startups interested in joining its open AI ecosystem.
“We are very much committed to expanding our startup engagements and expanding our university engagements because we think that Korea is really an excellent place for AI development,” Su said.
Asked why she had returned to South Korea after just seven months, Su said the country’s importance to AMD went beyond securing near-term chip supplies.
“The Korean ecosystem is extremely important for both from a supply standpoint as well as from a partnership standpoint,” she said, adding that AMD was planning with partners over the next three to five years.
Su also confirmed that she had met SK hynix during the trip and planned to meet Samsung, saying close communication had become essential as the AI industry moved at an unprecedented pace.
“Semiconductors is a team sport,” she said. “The more we communicate with our partners, the better we are going to be to service the overall market.”
For AMD and Nvidia, that team increasingly includes the same Korean players.
Su has put AMD’s gaming ambitions, AI plans and chip partnerships on display in Seoul this week. Next month, Nvidia gets its turn — with Korea’s technology companies courted by both sides.
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