AMD chief executive Lisa Su is flying to South Korea to meet with executives and discuss memory and supply chain issues.
For companies like AMD and Nvidia, both feeding the world’s giant AI infrastructure buildout, keeping close to suppliers is becoming a contact sport. Korean reports say Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang made repeated trips around Asia in 2025 to stay ahead on capacity.
It looks like AMD is getting equally twitchy, with Korean media reporting Su will be in South Korea by 18 March 2026. Reuters says the trip is expected to focus on securing high-bandwidth memory supplies used in AI chips, with meetings timed around Nvidia’s GTC event in San Jose running 16 to 19 March 2026
This will be her first visit to South Korea since taking office in 2014, and she plans to meet with key Korean partners, including Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon, and discuss cooperation plans in areas such as data centres.
The Jae-yong meeting is the big one, because the memory pipeline is now where AI ambitions go to get rationed. Demand for HBM, DRAM and NAND has been spiking alongside data centre spending, and everyone wants to be first in the queue.
AMD has been pushing its Instinct roadmap hard, with the MI400 series lined up as the next step in its accelerator fight. If you want to ship that kind of hardware at scale, you need guaranteed HBM allocation.
Samsung’s HBM business is no longer a cosy AMD side hustle either, since it has been working deeper into Nvidia’s supply chain too. That means capacity negotiations are likely to be spikier than they were when AMD could hoover up supply.
There is a wider angle as well, with reports in recent months saying AMD and Samsung Foundry have been discussing possible 2nm work tied to EPYC Venice. Even if that stays at the talking stage, it signals AMD wants more than one manufacturing route available when the pressure rises.
AMD is leaning into demand for “agentic AI” and trying to look more aggressive in servers at the same time. However, it is also seeing “Unexpected” CPU demand as the market heats up.
