They said that on Wednesday, South Korean chipmakers joined forces with ChatGPT to meet the growing demand for its Stargate Project.

The announcements came on Wednesday, after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the chairs of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix met with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung at the presidential offices in central Seoul.

In January, U.S. president Donald Trump announced a $500 billion Stargate Project. He charged OpenAI and its partners, including SoftBank and Oracle, with the responsibility of ensuring that the U.S. is a leader in the field of artificial intelligence.

OpenAI's main idea was to expand chip availability. Nvidia announced last week that it would invest $100 billion into the project and provide it with datacenter chips.

FIRMS SUPPLY A LARGE PART OF OPENAI’S DEMAND FOR STARGATE CHIPS

The South Korean presidential office stated that OpenAI's chip requirement for Stargate is expected to reach 900,000. OpenAI hopes to source a large portion of this from Samsung and SK Hynix. The company added that the timeline for supply had not been determined.

The office stated that the partnership provided South Korean chipmakers with an early foothold into the largest AI infrastructure project in the world, providing growth opportunities for the domestic chip sector.

Samsung and SK Hynix hold together about 70% of global Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRA) chip market, and almost 80% of HBM market.

HBM, a DRAM standard that was first introduced in 2013, involves stacking the chips vertically. This helps to reduce power consumption and saves space. It also helps to process large volumes of data produced by complex AI applications.

OpenAI opened its first office in Seoul this year as South Koreans demand for ChatGPT services surged. According to OpenAI, South Korea has the most paying ChatGPT users after the United States. Reporting by Heekyong Ya and Hyunjoo Ji. Mark Potter, Jan Harvey and Mark Potter edited the article.

(source: Reuters)