Zuckerberg meets LG leaders in South Korea to talk XR and on-device AI

Apple’s Vision Pro just hit shelves this month, and Mark Zuckerberg isn’t wasting any time building an alliance to counter it.

Late Tuesday, the Meta CEO landed in Seoul for his first known visit to South Korea in about a decade. Part of a broader Asian tour that includes Japan and India, his stops in Seoul zeroed in on two massive priorities: XR hardware and artificial intelligence.

Teaming up with LG for the next XR wave

On Wednesday, Zuckerberg sat down with top brass from LG Electronics, including CEO William Cho and parent company LG Corp COO Kwon Bong-seok.

According to LG, the executives discussed business strategies around next-generation XR device development. But it was not just about plastic and glass lenses.

LG’s Cho specifically expressed interest in Meta's large language models, opening the door for potential cooperation on on-device AI. LG has made no secret of its ambitions to break into XR, and partnering with Meta offers a fast track.

Meta rolled out its Quest 3 headset back in June, but Apple's Vision Pro launch this month drastically shifted the competitive landscape into high-end spatial computing.

Courting Samsung for critical AI silicon

Hardware is only half the puzzle. Zuckerberg also needs an enormous amount of raw silicon power to fuel Meta's AI ambitions.

On Wednesday evening, Zuckerberg met Samsung Electronics Chairman Jay Y. Lee for dinner at Seungjiwon, a high-end Korean restaurant in Seoul. He is also scheduled to meet South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Thursday.

Discussions with Samsung are widely expected to center on AI chip supplies and expanding generative AI ecosystems. Meta plans to integrate generative AI into its core social apps and hardware products throughout this year.

To back that push, Meta intends to deploy a new version of its custom in-house chip into data centers this year, alongside procuring roughly 350,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of the year. Keeping Samsung’s memory and foundry capacity close is crucial.

Why it matters

We see Zuckerberg’s trip as a clear move to assemble an anti-Apple coalition in consumer hardware, while derisking Meta’s massive AI infrastructure pipeline.

For users and creators, an LG partnership could deliver what Meta headsets have historically lacked: premium display technology, ergonomic build quality, and strong local hardware support. Pairing that with Meta's open-weight language models running locally on a headset could unlock much faster, private contextual interactions without round-tripping to cloud servers.

For the industry, this signals that the spatial computing race is breaking into classic tech battle lines. Apple is taking the walled-garden luxury route, while Meta is positioning itself as the ecosystem partner willing to team up with Asian electronics giants.

Turning LG into a hardware ally and keeping Samsung onboard for chip manufacturing allows Meta to hedge against Nvidia's supply crunches and Apple's hardware polish. Whether two massive corporate cultures can execute a seamless consumer product remains to be seen, but going shopping in Seoul looks like the smartest play Meta could make right now.