OpenAI says it is working with Samsung on its next-gen chips, and Samsung is one of the “largest-scale deployments of ChatGPT globally”
OpenAI is deepening cooperation with Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) as the ChatGPT maker develops its own chips, expanding ties …
Context & Ripple Effects
OpenAI's Samsung relationship had already moved beyond device discussions: Samsung deployed ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex across its South Korean and global DX staff in June, while OpenAI established a South Korean legal entity and planned a Seoul office in 2025. That makes Samsung both a major enterprise customer and a regional partner for OpenAI.
The chip work extends a strategy OpenAI began exploring in 2023, when it evaluated developing its own AI chips, alongside the reported Broadcom co-design effort. Samsung has separately committed major Nvidia-based AI infrastructure to its own chipmaking operations, giving the collaboration a hardware context rather than treating ChatGPT deployment as a standalone software sale.
First-order effects
- Samsung becomes a confirmed collaborator on OpenAI's next-generation chips while retaining a large-scale internal ChatGPT deployment, deepening the commercial relationship on both hardware and enterprise-software fronts.
- OpenAI adds Samsung to the set of partners surrounding its custom-chip effort, which had already included a reported Broadcom chip co-design for internal use.
Second-order effects
- Samsung's AI-chip and enterprise-AI teams gain a closer connection to a major model developer, making its investment in Nvidia-based AI manufacturing infrastructure more strategically relevant to its own operations.
- The arrangement puts OpenAI's chip program on a broader partner footing, increasing the importance of integration across chip design, manufacturing-oriented expertise, and the systems that run OpenAI's models.
Third-order effects
- If such customer-and-hardware partnerships persist, large AI labs' biggest enterprise deployments may increasingly serve as entry points to deeper silicon and infrastructure alliances.
- The pattern points toward AI providers seeking more influence over the hardware stack as compute supply and system-level optimization become central competitive constraints.
The trend: AI labs are pairing major enterprise deployments with custom-silicon partnerships to gain more control over the infrastructure behind their models.