OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Secretly Visits South Korea for Chip and Infrastructure Talks
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman secretly visited South Korea over the weekend to meet with top executives from Samsung and SK Group, advancing discussions on advanced memory chips and data center cooperation. This visit builds upon their existing partnership agreement tied to OpenAI's ambitious global AI infrastructure initiative, the Stargate project. Securing a reliable and scalable supply of high-performance hardware is critical for OpenAI as it scales its AI training and inference capabilities through the Stargate project. Partnering with South Korean memory giants Samsung and SK Hynix—which control a vast majority of the global HBM market—gives OpenAI direct access to the essential components required for next-generation AI accelerators. During his trip, Altman met with around 50 executives from various Samsung subsidiaries in Yongin and had lunch with SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won alongside high-ranking officials from SK Hynix and SK Telecom. The discussions focused on advanced memory supply plans, particularly high-bandwidth memory, and potential AI data center development projects within South Korea.
## BACKGROUND
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a high-performance 3D-stacked DRAM interface heavily utilized in data center graphics accelerators, AI accelerators, and high-performance computing to overcome memory bandwidth bottlenecks. The Stargate project is a massive, multi-billion-dollar AI infrastructure initiative backed by key tech players to build out large-scale data centers dedicated to powering OpenAI's advanced models.