OpenAI ropes in Korean giants Samsung and SK Hynix to feed its AI megaproject

Duo pledge memory for Stargate to the tune of 900k DRAM wafer starts a month

OpenAI has persuaded two of South Korea's chip titans to fuel its bid to build the biggest AI engine yet.

ChatGPT factory OpenAI confirmed this week that Samsung and SK Hynix will join the Stargate initiative, pledging to supply vast quantities of advanced memory chips and to collaborate on local AI datacenters. The agreement, announced in tandem with Seoul officials, solidifies Korea's role as a core supplier in what OpenAI boss Sam Altman modestly described as the largest infrastructure project since the dawn of the internet.

Stargate itself, unveiled in January, is OpenAI's blueprint for a global buildout of AI infrastructure, with as much as half a trillion dollars funnelled into new datacenters and compute capacity over the next four years. The company started by cutting a $100 billion check and striking a headline deal with Oracle to deploy gigawatts of datacenter power in the US. But even the fattest servers grind to a halt without enough memory, and it's here that Korea's giants enter the picture.

Samsung and SK Hynix have signed letters of intent to crank out the high-bandwidth DRAM and other memory silicon needed to keep future large language models from stalling. OpenAI says its Korean pals will be tasked with churning out around 900,000 DRAM wafer starts a month, a scale that only the biggest fabs on the planet can support. 

The agreements also cover a tie-up with SK Telecom to explore building an AI datacenter in Korea, plus separate talks with Samsung C&T, Samsung Heavy Industries, and Samsung SDS to scope out extra capacity in the country. Samsung SDS, the company's IT arm, will even sell ChatGPT Enterprise to local businesses as part of the tie-up.

Seoul is pitching the deal as Korea's ticket to the big league of AI infrastructure, hoping to surf the same wave that has made Nvidia the market's darling. OpenAI isn't chasing bragging rights so much as covering its backside – making sure it has enough suppliers scattered around the globe so a hiccup in one place doesn't bring the whole show down. 

Samsung shares hit their highest level since January 2021 on the news, while SK Hynix stock surged almost 10 percent to levels not seen since 2000.

OpenAI, meanwhile, just notched a sky-high paper valuation. According to the Financial Times, a secondary share sale closed this week that saw employees and early investors cash out around $6.6 billion worth of stock. This pushed the company's value to a cool $500 billion – a valuation so high even ChatGPT would struggle to justify it. ®