Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and chairman of Reliance Industries Ltd., will come to South Korea for talks with Samsung Electronics Co. Chairman Lee Jae-yong subsequent week – a transfer seen as strengthening collaboration in next-generation telecommunications and synthetic intelligence infrastructure.
Ambani, 68, will arrive in Korea on Nov. 25 for a two-day journey along with his eldest son Akash Ambani, chairman and chief of the board of administrators of Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd., in response to folks acquainted with the matter.
The Ambanis are slated to tour Samsung’s Suwon advanced with the Samsung chair, identified within the West by his English identify Jay Y. Lee.
The Indian tycoons will examine Samsung’s manufacturing traces for 5G gear and early-stage 6G improvement.
They’re visiting a Samsung website for the primary time – a transfer that business executives say alerts the opportunity of follow-on business offers.
The 2 Indian enterprise leaders will then transfer to Seoul for a non-public dinner with Lee, joined by the pinnacle of Samsung’s networks division, which competes globally with Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia, sources mentioned.
‘ALPHA AND OMEGA’ OF DOING BUSINESS IN INDIA
The assembly carries weight far past a routine courtesy name.
Mukesh Ambani, typically known as the “alpha and omega” of doing enterprise in India, given his affect, presides over a sprawling conglomerate spanning vitality, retail and telecoms on the earth’s most populous nation.
Reliance can be constructing what is anticipated to be the world’s largest AI-optimized data-center advanced.
Forbes estimates Ambani’s internet price at $111.4 billion, making him Asia’s wealthiest particular person and the world’s fifteenth.
Executives, together with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai have all just lately courted Ambani as they vie for entry to India’s digital infrastructure growth.
STRONG SAMSUNG-RELIANCE PARTNERSHIP
Reliance has lengthy been certainly one of Samsung’s most vital abroad telecoms purchasers.
Since 2012, the Indian conglomerate has invested about 40 trillion received ($27.3 billion) to roll out a nationwide 4G LTE community, with Samsung serving for greater than a decade as its sole gear provider.
Reliance Jio, chaired by Akash Ambani since 2022, has grown into one of many world’s largest cellular carriers with greater than 506 million subscribers as of September.
India’s transition to 5G has opened up new aggressive dynamics.
New Delhi, locked in geopolitical tensions with Beijing, has blocked Huawei’s 5G gear from its networks.
A lot of the early alternative demand went to Ericsson and Nokia – a spot Samsung hopes to slim as Reliance scales up its latest build-outs.
Reliance can be creating a 3 GW data-center advanced within the western state of Gujarat, one of many largest single-site initiatives globally, and is planning one other GW-class information heart within the nation’s southeastern area.
For Samsung, these amenities current a doubtlessly huge marketplace for high-speed networking gear tailor-made to AI workloads.
LEE’S PERSONAL DIPLOMACY
Analysts mentioned subsequent week’s gathering may develop into a catalyst for Samsung’s networks unit, which has struggled to safe main worldwide wins in recent times.
The corporate’s semiconductor foundry arm has solely just lately emerged from a chronic hunch after touchdown a big AI-chip order from Tesla.
Lee has cultivated unusually shut ties with Ambani’s household, being the solely Korean enterprise chief invited to all three of the Reliance heirs’ extremely publicized weddings.
His look in a conventional Indian turban at Akash Ambani’s 2019 ceremony grew to become a social-media sensation
Since final yr, Lee has held high-profile conferences with Nvidia’s Huang, Meta’s Zuckerberg, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Xiaomi’s Lei Jun and Mercedes-Benz chief Ola Källenius.
A current informal fried-chicken dinner in Seoul with Nvidia’s Huang preceded Samsung’s announcement that it’ll “pre-purchase” 50,000 Nvidia GPUs amid a worldwide scarcity.
A video name with Elon Musk helped safe a Tesla order for AI chips manufactured on Samsung’s superior foundry traces.
Lee additionally maintains long-standing ties with United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, fueling hypothesis that Samsung may prolong its AI data-center partnerships to the Gulf.
