A partner named, without a part number

OpenAI is working with Samsung Electronics on chips of its own, the head of the company’s Korean operation said at a press conference in Seoul on 9 September. “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, according to Bloomberg.

The account carries no specification, no process node and no timeline. What it establishes is that OpenAI’s custom silicon programme has more than one manufacturing partner.

Where this sits next to Jalapeno

OpenAI unveiled its first custom AI chip, Jalapeno, in June. That part was developed with Broadcom and manufactured by TSMC, and it was built for inference — running models rather than training them.

The Seoul city skyline at dusk
The announcement was made at a press conference in Seoul on 9 September. Stock image. Ethan Brooke · pexels · Pexels License

Samsung’s existing relationship with OpenAI is on the memory side. Along with SK Hynix, it signed a letter of intent last year to supply memory chips for the Stargate data centre programme. Moving from supplying memory to co-developing logic is a different kind of commitment, and it is the part of the announcement that matters to anyone modelling who builds OpenAI’s hardware.

The enterprise half of the announcement

The same briefing covered OpenAI’s commercial position in South Korea. The company said ChatGPT Enterprise seats in the country grew roughly 28-fold year over year through August, spreading into legal, finance, marketing and operations work. Samsung is itself deploying ChatGPT across research and development, marketing and sales.

Memory modules seen close up on a circuit board
Samsung and SK Hynix signed memory supply agreements for Stargate last year. Stock image. Nicolas Foster · pexels · Pexels License

That pairing is the point of the event. A chip partnership and a large enterprise account with the same company are two halves of one relationship, and OpenAI presented them together.

What to watch

The test of a claim like this is a part with a name and a date. Jalapeno took roughly a year from partnership to unveiling. Until Samsung’s contribution has a comparable milestone attached, this is a stated direction rather than a shipped product.