OpenAI Deepens Chip and Enterprise AI Cooperation With Samsung in Seoul

OpenAI is deepening its cooperation with Samsung Electronics as the ChatGPT maker develops its own computer chips, expanding ties with the South Korean technology giant across semiconductors and enterprise AI services. "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," Harrison Kim, general manager of OpenAI Korea, said at a press conference in Seoul.

In June, OpenAI unveiled its first custom AI chip, called Jalapeno, designed together with Broadcom for AI inference — the process of crunching data to answer queries in applications such as ChatGPT. OpenAI said Taiwan's TSMC would manufacture the chips. Last year, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix signed letters of intent to supply memory chips for OpenAI's Stargate data centre project. Kim said demand for memory chips would keep growing as faster, more complex computing needs more advanced chips, making cooperation with South Korean semiconductor suppliers a priority for OpenAI's local office.

Kim also said Samsung Electronics was "one of the largest-scale deployments of ChatGPT globally," with the company's employees in Korea and overseas using it for work across research and development, marketing and sales. Samsung said in June that workers in its Device eXperience division, which covers mobile phones, televisions and home appliances, would be allowed to use ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude internally.

OpenAI said the number of ChatGPT Enterprise users at South Korean companies and institutions had surged about 28-fold as of the end of August from a year earlier, as businesses broadened their use of AI from individual tasks to company-wide operations including legal, sales, finance, marketing and operations work. The company declined to give absolute user numbers, but said South Korea had the largest number of paying ChatGPT subscribers outside the United States as of late last year.

OpenAI launched its latest model, GPT-6 Astra, on 4 September, which it said offered improved performance in computer use, professional work, science, coding and cybersecurity.