AMD CEO Su Zifeng Meets Samsung Electronics and Upstage Executives to Discuss AI Collaboration

American tech giant AMD CEO Su Zifeng met with executives from Samsung Electronics and Korean AI startup Upstage on Thursday to discuss strengthening AMD’s AI collaborations in the region.

Su Zifeng began a two-day visit to Korea on Wednesday, meeting with Samsung Electronics’ Co-CEO for Mobile Business, Lu Tae-won, at Samsung’s headquarters in Seoul.

When entering the building, Su told reporters, “There are many topics to discuss,” but did not reveal further details. “We will have a very good discussion.”

Industry insiders expect Su to continue negotiations with Samsung Electronics on business cooperation, focusing on AI ecosystems for personal computers and tablets.

Before meeting with Samsung, Su also met with Upstage CEO Sung Kim to explore broader collaboration to promote AI innovation.

Since AMD’s participation in Upstage’s 62 billion won (about $41.3 million) Series B transitional investment last year, the two have been strategic partners.

Under the expanded cooperation agreement, Upstage will deploy AMD’s Instinct MI355 accelerators in phases over the next year, utilizing its graphics processing units (GPUs) to enhance large language models (LLMs) and document processing engines.

This deployment will also support the development of autonomous AI models, part of the Korean government-led AI foundation model project. Upstage has entered the second phase of the project alongside SK Telecom and LG AI Research.

AMD and Upstage stated that their collaboration aims to strengthen Korea’s domestic AI ecosystem and diversify the country’s AI infrastructure.

Upstage said that this partnership, supported by AMD’s GPUs, is expected to play a key role in advancing its LLM (Lifecycle Management) projects and building Korea’s autonomous AI models.

“Combining AMD’s GPUs with Korea’s local infrastructure will lay the foundation for Korea to become a true competitor in the global AI arena,” Sung Kim said.

Su Zifeng explained that choosing Upstage as a partner was because the startup is a leader in Korea’s AI innovation field.

She added, “This collaboration combines AMD’s Instinct GPUs and ROCm open-source software with Upstage’s expertise to enhance Korea’s autonomous AI capabilities and provide the performance, efficiency, and open ecosystem needed to accelerate AI innovation.”

The day before, Su also met with Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong. This meeting took place after Samsung announced an agreement with AMD on Wednesday. Samsung will supply its latest high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips for AMD’s next-generation AI accelerators.

According to the memorandum of understanding (MOU), Samsung Electronics was designated as the preferred HBM4 supplier for AMD’s latest AI data center graphics processor (GPU), the Instinct MI455X.