By Heekyong Yang
SEOUL, Sept 9 (Reuters) – OpenAI is deepening cooperation with Samsung Electronics as the ChatGPT maker develops its own chips, expanding ties with the South Korean technology giant across semiconductors and enterprise AI services.
“One of the areas where we have made the most progress and gained the most recognition with Samsung Electronics is our joint production and research on the next-generation chips we are developing,” Harrison Kim, General Manager of OpenAI Korea, said at a press conference in Seoul on Wednesday, without elaborating.
Kim also said Samsung Electronics was “one of the largest-scale deployments of ChatGPT globally,” saying the company’s employees in Korea and overseas use ChatGPT for work across research and development, marketing and sales.
Samsung Electronics said in a statement that it could not confirm information related to customers.
In June, OpenAI unveiled its first custom artificial intelligence chip designed with Broadcom. OpenAI’s engineers designed the chip, called Jalapeno, together with Broadcom for a task known as AI inference, the process of crunching data to answer queries in applications such as ChatGPT.
OpenAI at that time said that Taiwan’s TSMC would manufacture the chips.
Last year, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix signed letters of intent to supply memory chips for OpenAI’s Stargate data centre project.
Kim said demand for memory chips would continue to grow as more advanced chips were needed to enable faster and more complex computing, making cooperation with South Korean semiconductor suppliers a priority for OpenAI’s local office.
The cooperation comes as Samsung broadens its use of generative AI. The company said in June that workers in its Device eXperience division, which oversees mobile phones, televisions and home appliances, would be allowed to use ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude internally.
OpenAI said the number of ChatGPT Enterprise users at South Korean companies and institutions had surged about 28-fold as of the end of August from a year earlier, as businesses broadened their use of artificial intelligence from individual tasks to company-wide operations.
Companies were increasingly using AI across functions including legal, sales, finance, marketing and operations, OpenAI said. The company declined to provide absolute user numbers.
South Korea had the largest number of paying ChatGPT subscribers outside the United States as of late last year, according to OpenAI.
OpenAI expects adoption to accelerate following the September 4 launch of GPT-6 Astra, its latest model, which it said offered improved performance in computer use, professional work, science, coding and cybersecurity.
(Reporting by Heekyong Yang and Hyunjoo JinEditing by Ed Davies)
