OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has met with top executives from Samsung in an effort to shore up its supply of memory chips amid ongoing shortages.. Per a report from Bloomberg, Altman met with around 50 senior executives from the South Korean chipmaker in Yongin, south of Seoul, to discuss the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on industries such as finance and biotech, and potential business opportunities over the coming decade.. – Getty Images.
The discussions took place in the same week that the OpenAI CEO appeared on the Cheeky Pint podcast, where he told the host – Stripe co-founder John Collison – that individuals using their desktop computers to do local inference were further constraining memory chip supply chains.. “A lot of people want local inference, and somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now, because we are going to have open-source models,” Altman said..
“[They think] ‘We’re going to be able to run them on our computers and so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data center.’“. He continued: “But, from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time.
You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”. Memory companies have warned that the memory chip shortage is likely to persist into 2027 and beyond, with consumer electronics the most likely to suffer in the face of ongoing shortages, as capacity will increasingly become allocated to AI infrastructure projects..
In January 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that data from TrendForce shows that up to 70 percent of the memory produced worldwide in 2026 will be consumed by data centers.. In October 2025, OpenAI signed a letter of intent (LOI) with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix for the supply of memory chips..
At the time, the companies released a statement claiming OpenAI’s Stargate memory demand was projected to reach 900,000 DRAM wafers a month, although no timeline was given for when that demand was expected to be met.. No further details regarding the agreement or anticipated DRAM allocation have been provided by either company.
However, in September of this year, following comments from Harrison Kim, general manager of OpenAI Korea, that Samsung was working with OpenAI on the development of next-generation chips, a spokesperson for OpenAI said the partners were simply planning to expand their collaboration “in the context of our existing relationship, including Samsung Electronics’ adoption of ChatGPT and the LOI announced last October.”. More in IT Hardware & Semiconductors.
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