Samsung and SK Group join the Stargate project

OpenAI announced partnerships with Samsung and SK Group, the two dominant South Korean memory-chip makers, extending its Stargate infrastructure programme into Korea. The announcement followed a meeting in Seoul between South Korean president Lee Jae-myung, Samsung Electronics chairman Jay Y. Lee, SK chairman Chey Tae-won and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.

SK Hynix agreed to work with Samsung and OpenAI to scale up memory production, with the companies citing projected demand reaching up to 900,000 DRAM wafer starts a month — a substantial claim on global memory supply given that both firms are already among the world’s largest DRAM producers. On the datacentre side, Samsung C&T and Samsung Heavy Industries agreed to assess building floating datacentres, floating power plants and control centres, an unusual construction approach reflecting land and grid-connection constraints in Korea, while Samsung SDS would evaluate a role designing, building and operating Stargate facilities and reselling OpenAI’s services domestically. OpenAI separately signed an agreement with Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT to study datacentre sites outside the Seoul metropolitan area.

The agreements were non-binding and did not disclose dollar figures, in keeping with the pattern of OpenAI’s earlier Stargate announcements with Oracle, SoftBank, Nvidia and other partners: broad statements of intent naming enormous compute and chip volumes, with the harder questions of financing, siting and construction timelines to be resolved later. The Korea deal underlined how central memory-chip supply, rather than logic chips alone, had become to the arithmetic of frontier AI infrastructure buildouts.