OpenAI and Samsung further partnership on next generation AI chips

OpenAI’s partnership with Samsung Electronics on next-generation semiconductors continues to deepen, and the South Korean manufacturer has now agreed to produce a custom AI chip for the ChatGPT maker, OpenAI Korea confirmed at a Seoul press conference on Wednesday. The move is expected to draw Samsung deeper into a chip race that has so far been dominated by Nvidia and TSMC.

Harrison Kim, General Manager of OpenAI Korea, told reporters that chips were the area where the two firms had achieved the most in their partnership. “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,” Kim said, according to Reuters.

The collaboration runs across multiple fronts, including joint chip research, actual chip manufacturing, and a more expansive use of OpenAI’s enterprise software inside Samsung. OpenAI has not disclosed the chip’s name or its exact purpose, although reports believe it is likely to be an inference processor and a successor to Jalapeno.

Where the chip fits after Jalapeno

Jalapeno was OpenAI’s first custom chip, produced by Taiwan’s TSMC and unveiled in June. Developed with Broadcom, the chip is designed to handle inference workloads. Having Samsung lead the next design would give OpenAI a second manufacturing partner, reducing its reliance on a single supplier.

Memory seems to be the other half of the deal, with both companies planning to work on advanced memory chips to feed heavier AI workloads, an effort that could be connected to OpenAI’s Stargate data center project.

Stargate already involves Samsung’s domestic rival SK Hynix, and both Korean firms already signed letters of intent to supply memory for it last year.

Samsung’s memory push and ChatGPT footprint

Samsung has started shipping samples of its HBM4E high-bandwidth memory, becoming the first supplier to distribute that generation of AI memory. High-bandwidth memory sits inside AI accelerators such as Nvidia’s Rubin and Google’s Ironwood Tensor Processing Unit, and Samsung counts top chipmakers like AMD, Nvidia, and Google as part of its customers.

Kim also called Samsung one of the largest ChatGPT deployments anywhere, with staff in Korea and abroad using the AI model across research, marketing, and sales. OpenAI said ChatGPT Enterprise users across South Korean businesses and institutions increased 28-fold by late August, compared to the same month in 2025.

Late last year, no country outside the United States had more paying ChatGPT subscribers than South Korea, according to the company. In June, Samsung’s Device eXperience division cleared employees to use ChatGPT alongside Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.

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