OpenAI is deepening its partnership with Samsung Electronics on next-generation semiconductor technology as the artificial intelligence company expands its push into custom hardware and enterprise AI.
Harrison Kim, General Manager of OpenAI Korea, said the two companies had made significant progress in research and development relating to future chips being developed by OpenAI.
“One of the areas where we have made the most progress and gained the most recognition with Samsung Electronics is our joint production and research on the next-generation chips we are developing,” Kim said at a press conference in Seoul.
He did not provide detailed technical specifications or a timetable for the processors.
Samsung Becomes Major Enterprise AI User
The partnership extends beyond semiconductor development.
Kim said Samsung had become one of OpenAI’s largest corporate deployments worldwide, with employees using ChatGPT across research and development, sales, marketing and other business functions.
Samsung declined to confirm customer-specific details.
The relationship illustrates how large technology companies are increasingly engaging with AI firms both as customers and strategic infrastructure partners.
Samsung is one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers and has major businesses spanning memory chips, smartphones, displays, appliances and electronics manufacturing.
That gives it a potentially important role as AI companies search for more diversified supply chains.
Memory Chips Become Strategic
OpenAI’s growing ties with South Korea also come at a time when memory chips have become a critical part of the AI infrastructure race.
Samsung and rival SK Hynix have signed letters of intent to supply memory chips for OpenAI’s Stargate data-centre initiative.
High-bandwidth memory has become particularly important because large AI models require enormous volumes of data to move rapidly between processors and memory.
The resulting demand has transformed advanced memory into one of the most strategically important components of modern AI systems.
OpenAI has meanwhile developed its first custom inference chip, Jalapeño, with Broadcom, while TSMC is expected to manufacture the processor.
South Korea Emerges as Key AI Market
South Korea is also becoming an important market for OpenAI’s software products.
The company said the number of ChatGPT Enterprise users in the country had increased 28-fold over the past year, while South Korea has the highest number of paying ChatGPT subscribers outside the United States.
That combination of consumer adoption, enterprise demand and semiconductor manufacturing makes the country strategically important to OpenAI.
The partnership with Samsung consequently reflects two sides of the AI race: companies need users for their models, but they also require increasingly specialised hardware to operate those models economically at massive scale.
As AI systems become more computationally demanding, relationships between model developers and semiconductor manufacturers are likely to become even more important.
