The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, is reportedly engaged in talks with investors in the Middle East to secure funding for the creation and release of in-house developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) system accelerators. In an encrypted piece of information released this week, Altman is said to have travelled to South Korea for negotiations with SK hynix and Samsung.
This information was disclosed by the news agency Reuters, citing its sources. If SK hynix is a memory chip manufacturer that has long been associated with NVIDIA for its demand for HBM3 type memory chips, Samsung Electronics is capable of producing third-party chips for its customers. From this perspective, it remains unclear what role OpenAI expects Samsung to play in potential partnerships.
Regardless, the current demand for HBM3 type memory chips has led to a profitable business for manufacturers. In the last quarter, SK hynix increased production volumes of such chips by more than fivefold while Samsung Electronics has plans to significantly increase its investments in similar memory chip production. The development of modern computational accelerators that can rival NVIDIA’s solutions will invariably involve the participation of SK hynix, Samsung, or Micron. The OpenAI management is well-aware of this inevitability.
