Lee Jae-yong

Lee Jae-yong (born 1968), known offstage as Jay Y. Lee, is the executive chairman of Samsung Electronics and the third-generation head of Korea’s largest conglomerate — grandson of Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul and son of Lee Kun-hee. His ascent survived one of Korea’s most watched legal sagas: convicted of bribery in 2017, jailed twice, pardoned in 2022, and finally acquitted of fraud charges in a ruling upheld by the Supreme Court in 2025.

Betting the chaebol on AI memory

On October 1, 2025, Lee hosted Sam Altman in Seoul and signed a letter of intent for Samsung to supply high-bandwidth memory and advanced DRAM for OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate infrastructure project — with OpenAI’s appetite projected at up to 900,000 DRAM wafers a month, more than double current global capacity. The pact, sealed alongside SK hynix after a meeting with President Lee Jae-myung, extends beyond chips: Samsung SDS is to help build Korean data centers and Samsung Heavy Industries is exploring floating data centers.

The deal capped Lee’s repositioning of Samsung around AI after a bruising stretch in which the company fell behind SK hynix in HBM chips for Nvidia. Analysts put the Stargate commitment at over 100 trillion won (about $72 billion) in incremental demand for Korean chipmakers over four years, and Samsung shares hit record highs on the news. Critics note the bet chains Samsung’s fortunes to a single customer’s famously audacious spending plans — and to the AI boom continuing at all.