Samsung's Jay Y. Lee Leads Charge at Sun Valley Summit to Secure AI Chip Orders, Targeting Apple and Cloud Giants Amid TSMC Overflow

Samsung Electronics Chairman Jay Y. Lee attended this week’s Sun Valley Summit in Idaho, bringing along Han Jin-man, the newly appointed head of its foundry business since late last year—a strategic shift from last year’s delegation of global marketing executives. This year’s move underscores Samsung’s intensified focus on securing custom silicon foundry (Custom Silicon Foundry) deals, building on its existing HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) supply relationships.

Market analysts interpret Lee’s presence as a clear signal that breaking into the foundry market and capturing overflow orders from TSMC has become Samsung’s top strategic priority. Notably, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla CEO Elon Musk did not attend this year’s summit, while Lee personally led Samsung’s delegation.

The 2024 Sun Valley Summit gathered tech titans including Apple CEO Tim Cook and incoming CEO John Ternus (effective September 1), Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, ARM CEO, and GM Chair Mary Barra. Most of these leaders represent companies with existing or potential foundry and HBM supply relationships with Samsung.

The most anticipated interaction was between Samsung and Apple. Apple sent an unusually high-level delegation—its current CEO, incoming CEO, and Senior Vice President of Services—highlighting the strategic importance of the discussions. In August last year, Samsung secured Apple’s image sensor (CIS) chip order. Now, it is aggressively pursuing a return to Apple’s iPhone application processor (AP) supply chain, currently exclusively manufactured by TSMC.

According to Bloomberg, Apple executives recently discussed the possibility of outsourcing main processor manufacturing to Samsung. If realized, this would mark the first time Samsung captures core iPhone chip production from TSMC, delivering a significant boost to its foundry business.

Amazon’s Jassy and OpenAI’s Altman both attended the summit. As existing HBM customers of Samsung, they are also developing in-house AI chips (e.g., Trainium, inference chips) to reduce reliance on NVIDIA. With TSMC’s advanced process capacity consistently at full utilization, Samsung’s 2-nanometer (SF2) process expansion plan positions it as a viable alternative for overflow demand.

Lee also met with GM Chair Mary Barra, potentially extending their collaboration in automotive batteries into advanced semiconductor applications for vehicles.

Known as the “Billionaires’ Summer Camp,” the Sun Valley Summit is an annual, invitation-only gathering in July of around 300 top executives from tech, media, finance, and automotive industries for private strategic discussions. Lee described it as “the busiest business trip of the year,” marking his second consecutive attendance.

Analysts emphasize that as Samsung’s foundry division faces intense competition from TSMC’s dominant market position, securing flagship clients has become urgent. The summit is no longer just a networking event but a critical battleground for securing advanced process orders in the AI era, vital for restoring Samsung’s foundry competitiveness.