OpenAI is aggressively expanding its compute capacity for artificial intelligence. The creator of ChatGPT announced it has reached agreements with two of the world’s largest memory chip manufacturers, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. The deal involves producing DRAM wafers for the Stargate AI infrastructure project and constructing new data centers in South Korea.
The letters of intent were signed after a meeting in Seoul. The meeting included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, South Korea’s President Lee Jae-myung, Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Jay Y. Lee, and SK Chairman Chey Tae-won.
As part of this agreement, Samsung and SK Hynix will scale their manufacturing to produce up to 900,000 high-bandwidth memory DRAM chips each month. These chips are destined for use in Stargate and other AI data centers. SK Group stated that this production level would more than double the current industry capacity for such high-bandwidth memory chips.
Stargate is a massive infrastructure project by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. The project aims to spend 500 billion dollars to build data centers in the United States dedicated to AI development.
These new agreements are part of a month of intense investment in AI compute capacity, with OpenAI at the center of much of this activity. Just a few weeks ago, Nvidia announced plans to invest up to 100 billion dollars in OpenAI. This deal will provide the ChatGPT maker with access to more than 10 gigawatts of compute capacity through Nvidia’s AI training systems.
The day after the Nvidia news, OpenAI revealed it would build five new data centers with SoftBank and Oracle for the Stargate project. This effort aims to increase its total compute capacity to 7 gigawatts. Earlier in September, Oracle agreed to sell 300 billion dollars worth of compute capacity to OpenAI over a five-year period.
In a separate initiative, OpenAI stated it is collaborating with the Korean Ministry of Science and ICT to identify opportunities for building AI data centers outside of Seoul. The company also confirmed a separate deal with SK Telecom to construct an AI data center. Additional agreements were signed with Samsung subsidiaries to explore avenues for building more data centers within the country.
As part of the overall deal, both Samsung and SK Group will integrate ChatGPT Enterprise and OpenAI APIs into their own operations.