Sam Altman Slips Into Seoul to Court 50 Samsung Chiefs as RAM Runs Dry

Sam Altman quietly touched down in South Korea over the weekend, and he wasn't there for the kimchi. The OpenAI chief sat down with roughly 50 senior executives from Samsung's electronics, finance and biotech arms at the company's Yongin campus, according to CNBC, with talks centered on expanding global AI data centers under OpenAI's Stargate initiative and finding fresh ways to work together.

Neither side walked out with a signed deal to show off. But the meeting itself is the story: AI models chew through memory at a rate that has chip buyers panicking, and getting face time with the people who actually make the stuff is now priority number one.

And those people are overwhelmingly in South Korea. Samsung and SK Hynix together pull in about 83% of global high-bandwidth memory revenue, per Counterpoint Research, and the pair also dominate standard DRAM sales. South Korean media reported Altman carved out time for a private lunch with SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won to chew over future memory supply.

The trip landed days after Altman ticked off PC builders by arguing on a podcast that personal computers waste far too much of their installed RAM, and that centralized data centers wring more out of memory than laptops idling on desks. Expect that hot take to get hotter now that he's been spotted courting the plants that supply it.

OpenAI isn't alone at the door. AMD CEO Lisa Su recently toured memory suppliers in the region too, telling the industry it needs to plan hardware orders three to five years out. With fabs retooling for server demand, the queue for memory is stretching longer by the month.

The fallout could land on regular shoppers. As corporations lock up supply ahead of time, phones and PCs may keep wearing fat price tags. OpenAI has published no formal summary of anything signed in Seoul, but the courtship between AI builders and Korean memory makers looks set to get a lot more serious.