OpenAI, Samsung Deepen AI Chip Partnership for Next-Generation Hardware

OpenAI is expanding its partnership with Samsung Electronics as the ChatGPT maker works on next-generation AI chips, adding semiconductor research to a growing relationship that already covers memory supply, AI infrastructure and enterprise use of ChatGPT.

The latest OpenAI-Samsung AI chip development was discussed by Harrison Kim, General Manager of OpenAI Korea, during a press conference in Seoul on Wednesday, September 9. Kim said OpenAI
and Samsung have made strong progress in joint work related to the production and research of next-generation chips, although he did not provide technical details about the chips or Samsung’s exact role.

The development adds another layer to OpenAI’s push to build more of the computing infrastructure needed to run increasingly powerful artificial intelligence models.

OpenAI Expands Its Custom AI Chip Work

OpenAI has already been developing its own AI hardware. In June, the company disclosed its first custom AI chip, called Jalapeno, which was designed together with Broadcom. The chip is intended for AI inference, the computing process used when systems such as ChatGPT respond to user requests. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, is expected to manufacture those chips.

The latest comments about Samsung appear to concern broader work on future generations of chips. OpenAI has not yet announced the specifications, production schedule or commercial launch plans for the hardware being developed with Samsung.

That distinction is important: Samsung has not been identified as the manufacturer of OpenAI’s Jalapeno chip. Instead, the companies are expanding their work across several areas of the AI hardware supply chain.

Samsung Already Part of OpenAI’s AI Infrastructure Plans

Samsung’s relationship with OpenAI goes beyond chip research.

Samsung Electronics previously agreed to serve as a strategic memory partner for OpenAI’s Stargate AI infrastructure project. Samsung said the project could eventually require as many as 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, creating significant demand for high-performance memory used in AI data centres.

Samsung and fellow South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix have also signed letters of intent related to supplying memory chips for Stargate. OpenAI expects demand for advanced memory products to keep rising as AI systems require faster and more complex computing.

Samsung brings several semiconductor capabilities to the partnership, including memory, logic chips, foundry services, advanced packaging and technologies that combine memory with system semiconductors.

Samsung Becomes a Major ChatGPT Enterprise Customer

The relationship between the companies has also expanded into enterprise AI.

OpenAI announced in June that Samsung Electronics would make ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex available to all Samsung Electronics employees in South Korea and to employees across its Device eXperience division worldwide. OpenAI described the rollout as one of its largest enterprise deployments.

Samsung plans to use the tools across areas including software development, manufacturing, product development, marketing and other business functions.

At Wednesday’s press conference, Kim described Samsung as one of the largest deployments of ChatGPT worldwide, with employees using the AI service across research and development, marketing, sales and other work.

The expansion comes as business use of ChatGPT grows rapidly in South Korea. OpenAI said the number of ChatGPT Enterprise users at South Korean companies and institutions had increased about 28-fold by the end of August compared with a year earlier. The company did not disclose the total number of users.

South Korea has also become an important market for OpenAI. The company has previously said the country had the largest number of paying ChatGPT subscribers outside the United States as of late 2025.

The growing Samsung partnership shows how OpenAI is moving beyond AI software and models into the hardware, memory and data-centre infrastructure needed to support them. More details about the next-generation chips being developed with Samsung have not yet been disclosed.