SK Group chief sees AI-induced changes as business opportunities

The chief of SK Group, South Korea's chip-to-chemical conglomerate, said Thursday the group will be quick to respond to AI-induced changes to grasp business opportunities and seek growth. In the group's annual SK Icheon Forum, SK Group Chairman and Chief Executive Chey Tae-won made the remarks, sharing his view with the group's employees on the burgeoning AI ecosystem and the group's response to upcoming changes. Mentioning the outlook of the AI market, Chey said, "The AI value chain does guarantee profits (for businesses) at the moment and big tech firms are making massive investments to take the lead in the AI market." There might be a bumpy road ahead but the AI industry is on track for further development, he said. The chairman has recently had meetings with leaders of major tech firms, such as AI giant Nvidia Corp., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), Microsoft Corp., U.S. e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc., and OpenAI, which unveiled ChatGPT in late 2022. "Big tech companies share a commo n view that nuclear power will be essential in operating AI data centers, which require a huge amount of energy," Chey said. "Any changes in energy mix due to the need of nuclear energy will also generate new business opportunities for us (the group)." SK Group, the country's second-biggest conglomerate by assets after Samsung Group, has a variety of energy-related affiliates. If the AI growth accelerates, SK Group will be able to seek businesses involving the AI data centers' hardware and large language model (LLM), a type of AI program that can recognize and generate text, among other tasks, the chairman said. SK hynix Inc., the group's flagship affiliate, has emerged the leading supplier of high-bandwidth memory chips, or HBMs, used in AI chipsets to Nvidia. Source: Yonhap News Agency