Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc. shares rose to their highest in years after South Korea’s largest companies forged initial agreements to supply chips to OpenAI’s Stargate project, reinforcing their lead in artificial intelligence memory.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman signed a letter of intent Wednesday to enlist the two firms in his data centre construction effort, a global undertaking that involves the sector’s biggest players from Nvidia Corp. to Oracle Corp. The US startup could need as many as 900,000 wafers per month as Stargate expands, the companies said.
That projection for demand is more than double the current global capacity for HBM or high-bandwidth memory, underscoring Stargate’s enormity and quickening global AI development, the SK group said. Shares in SK Hynix, the leader in HBM, surged 12% to its highest in more than two decades. Rival Samsung’s stock rose as much as 4.7% to a four-year peak, while Hynix-supplier Hanmi Semiconductor Co. leapt about 8%.
OpenAI and Nvidia are helping lead a global push to build data centres for a new generation of AI tools — an effort that’s expected to cost trillions of dollars and require chips, servers, cooling systems and copious amounts of electricity. Altman was due in Taipei next, where he’s slated to meet with AI linchpins Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., local media reported.
The pact signed in Seoul is aimed at creating a longer-term partnership between America’s most valuable AI startup and two Asian companies that, along with Micron Technology Inc., dominate the memory chip sphere. As part of the agreement, the partners will help Seoul develop a domestic AI ecosystem — something many governments are exploring to try and harness a potentially transformative technology.
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“I hope that Samsung and SK will play a key role in the global spread of AI together with OpenAI,” Korean President Lee Jae Myung said in the statement.
Last month, Nvidia announced it will invest as much as US$100 billion ($128.84 billion) in OpenAI to support new data centres and other infrastructure, a blockbuster deal that underscores booming demand for services like ChatGPT and the computing power needed to make them run.
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SK Hynix is the global leader in the provision of HBM essential to Nvidia’s AI accelerators, though Samsung is vying to become a major supplier as well.
Other Samsung group companies, including Samsung SDS Co., Samsung C&T Corp. and Samsung Heavy Industries Co., will also partner with OpenAI to explore future technologies. Those include floating data centres and collaboration in data centre design.
SK Telecom Co. and OpenAI will jointly build a dedicated OpenAI data centre in the country’s southwest.
“Korea clearly seems to be a key focus market for OpenAI,” Jefferies analyst William Beavington wrote.
