Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who’s touring Asia countries this week, said in a gathering with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Thursday that Meta desires to beef up its cooperation with Samsung Electronics for AI chips to offset geopolitical risk issue in Taiwan, where TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chip manufacturer, is headquartered.
Zuckerberg and Yoon also discussed ways to expand cooperation in artificial intelligence and prolonged reality industries, a South Korean presidential official said in a briefing today (in Korean).
AI processors — the manufacturing and procurement, and the event of cutting-edge technologies which can be more efficient than the present generation of chips — have turn out to be a significant priority for any company working in the sector of AI, and so too they’ve turn out to be a spotlight for Meta for the longer term of its social media and hardware devices businesses.
Zuckerberg reportedly met Samsung’s executives, including Samsung executive chairman Jay Y. Lee, Wednesday night to debate potential collaborations around AI chips, semiconductors, and prolonged reality. A Samsung spokesperson declined to comment on Zuckerberg’s meeting with Samsung when contacted by TechCrunch for a response to the report, but in addition didn’t dispute it.
TSMC opened its first chip fabrication plant in Japan to diversify its supply chains away from Taiwan because the U.S.-China tech war intensifies. TSMC-owned Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing (JASM), which was established by the Japanese government and the companies in 2020, began the plant’s construction process in April 2022. JASM is about to establish its second chip plant in Japan, with construction begin in 2024-end.
Meta’s founder also met Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Tuesday to debate AI and semiconductors. Japan has been searching for to revitalize its chip making industry, which is about 10 years behind Taiwan and South Korea in terms of next-generation chips.
Zuckerberg’s tour coincides with what has turn out to be a significant global AI chip race. Nvidia continues to dominate the worldwide marketplace for AI chips, leaving a giant opportunity for countries which have traditionally been strong in processors or reignite their innovation instincts. That’s something that tech corporations constructing AI businesses are keen to support to ease their Nvidia dependence. To that end, the social media giant has been ramping up its efforts to secure AI chips, and has been working by itself in-house AI chip, Artemis, for its data centers. Big tech corporations like Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, and Google have equally been scrambling for AI chips to support their AI ambitions.
Meta’s ambition on XR: Meeting with LG
The meetings today are the newest in a string of visits that the Meta CEO has been making within the region. Just yesterday, Zuckerberg met LG Electronics CEO William Cho in Seoul during his tour of Asia. LG Electronics said it had a two-hour-long meeting with Zuckerberg to debate the 2 corporations’ potential strategic collaboration on prolonged reality (XR) device development.
When TechCrunch asked if the discussion included concrete plans between the 2 parties, a spokesperson of LG Electronics said that LG Electronics and Meta “have been working closely even before the highest management meeting yesterday,” and that the 2 corporations were expecting more opportunities going forward. No details on financial terms or what products specifically a collaboration would involve.
The LG spokesperson also said, citing the corporate CEO Cho, who told local reporters after the meeting, “The highest management of the 2 corporations discussed the strategic directions and timelines of the collaboration.”
On the a part of LG, the Korean tech giant desires to bring Meta’s prolonged reality (XR) platform to LG’s content and consumer devices — for instance, its TVs — to forge a “distinctive ecosystem” within the Korean company’s newly arrange XR business, LG said in a press release.
LG, like every other tech company on this planet today, is blowing the AI horn in the intervening time. But realistically, it has not made many waves to this point within the AI race — neither as a chipmaker, nor as a developer of AI-centric products, nor in services. Meta presents a probability for LG to partner with an organization that has made more headway, yet which doesn’t present a direct competitor to LG by way of its larger consumer electronics business, and furthermore offsets the dominance of another big players within the AI space like Google and OpenAI.
Working example: the corporate specifically has identified that Cho “expressed a keen interest in Meta’s advanced technology demonstrations, notably specializing in Meta’s large language models and its potential for on-device AI integration,” while experiencing the Quest 3 headset Meta recently launched and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, the corporate said.
After LG shut down its struggling mobile business globally in April 2021, the Korean electronics and appliance giant shifted its business focus to other growth areas, including smart homes, connected devices, the Web of Things (IoT), electric vehicle (EV) components and robotics and — useless to say — artificial intelligence platforms.
In late November, LG said that its home entertainment division had newly arrange an prolonged reality (XR) team as a part of the organization reshuffle to expedite the event of an XR device, aiming for 2025.
“We’re excited to see a longtime leader in consumer electronics share our commitment to constructing the following generation of XR devices,” a spokesperson at Meta said. “Meta’s vision for a more open ecosystem relies on collaboration among the many industry’s most modern corporations and we stay up for our work with LG leading to more ways for people the world over to learn from the computing platforms of the longer term.”
