Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are preparing to unveil major supply agreements with American technology companies during President Lee Jae Myung’s visit to Silicon Valley.The negotiations behind these deals have been running for months. What changed is the venue, and that detail says something about how Seoul wants this relationship read going forward.Chief Presidential Secretary for Policy Kim Yong-beom told reporters on Thursday, July 23, that the agreements would likely include new long-term memory chip supply deals, strategic investment partnerships, and memorandums of understanding, according to Bloomberg.He declined to disclose the value of the deals ahead of company announcements. Kim called the July 24-25 presidential trip a catalyst that helped close talks, which had dragged on between Korean firms and their U.S. counterparts, Reuters noted.What Seoul actually confirmedLee began the trip in San Francisco on Friday, July 24, where he attended an AI summit and held separate meetings with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Broadcom’s Hock Tan.Samsung Executive Chairman Jay Y. Lee and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won also attended, alongside Hyundai Motor’s Euisun Chung and Naver founder Lee Hae-jin.Kim said the deals build on an investment plan Seoul revealed last month, worth at least $880 billion and backed by Samsung, SK Group, and Naver.The initiative aims to cement South Korea’s position in the global AI supply chain by building a massive domestic mega-cluster for memory chip manufacturing and AI data centers. He added that American technology companies already account for 80% to 90% of the underlying orders driving that expansion.That figure explains why this trip reads more like a formalization exercise than a new courtship, especially after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Samsung and SK Hynix earlier this month to expand memory production on U.S. soil, according to Bloomberg.
Samsung and SK Hynix are set to announce major U.S. memory chip supply deals during President Lee Jae Myung’s Silicon Valley trip.JUNG YEON-JE / Getty Images
The timing lines up with SK Hynix’s Nasdaq debutHere’s the part that other coverage of the trip has mostly skipped: The announcement lands two weeks after SK Hynix completed a $26.5 billion American depositary receipt offering, the largest first-time U.S. share sale by a foreign company.The listing gave American investors direct access to the world’s leading producer of high-bandwidth memory chips for the first time.Related: After beating Samsung, tech titan files for IPOBefore July, buying SK Hynix meant trading on the Korea Exchange during Seoul hours.That access changes how this week’s news will land. A Silicon Valley supply deal used to be a story that mostly moved Korean trading screens overnight. Now it moves a Nasdaq-listed stock that American fund managers can buy the moment the headline crosses.July 24 trading shows how fast that sensitivity has becomeSamsung and SK Hynix (SKHY) shares swung sharply through the session. Both stocks opened lower after an overnight Wall Street sell-off tied to renewed Middle East tensions dragged the Kospi down nearly 5%, triggering a temporary halt on program selling, according to Seoul Economic Daily.More Tech:Microsoft cuts thousands as Xbox faces rude awakeningSpectrum makes significant decision as customer losses mountGiant troubled satellite TV company files Chapter 11 bankruptcyBy the close, Samsung had climbed 7.51% and SK Hynix had gained 8.53%, according to Bloomberg market data, as the deal news overtook the earlier macro jitters.That reversal is the real story for investors. Korean memory stocks used to trade mostly on domestic sentiment and U.S. chip earnings. They now move on South Korean diplomacy too, with a meaningful slice of that ownership sitting in American hands for the first time.The structural shift investors should trackWashington has spent months pushing Samsung and SK Hynix toward deeper U.S. manufacturing commitments, and Seoul has spent that same stretch insisting its expansion was demand-driven rather than coerced.The Silicon Valley trip narrows that gap into paperwork. It also marks the first time a Korean chip diplomacy story and a Nasdaq listed equity story are the same trade, which means future announcements like this one will move markets in Seoul and New York at the same moment, not on a delay.Related: SK Hynix denies Intel Ohio fab deal, but the market didn’t care