OpenAI's Sam Altman discusses chip collab with Samsung and SK Hynix: Report

OpenAI
(Image credit: OpenAI)

Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, is in South Korea to meet semiconductor industry leaders, notably from Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. His visit primarily focuses on exploring potential partnerships for his AI chip production venture that he has been working on for a while, reports Bloomberg, citing unofficial sources with knowledge of the matter.

The head of OpenAI arrived in Seoul on Thursday. Altman's objectives in South Korea align with his ambitions for OpenAI in general and AI-specialized hardware in particular. His schedule appears packed as he is set to meet executives from multiple Samsung divisions, including the System LSI unit that designs chips; Samsung Semiconductor, which produces DRAM and 3D NAND memory; and Samsung Foundry, which builds chips under contracts.

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • bit_user
    The key question I have is whether they have some unique insights into what sort of hardware will be best suited to their next gen AI, or whether this is really just about cost and/or scaling capacity.

    If the first part is true, then I can definitely understand why they'd want to guard these insights and not just feed them to Nvidia as feature-requests for future chips, since that would mean their competitors also gaining the benefits of those same features. Or, maybe they did feed feature requests to Nvidia but were unhappy with some aspect of the response.
    Reply