Sam Altman meets with Samsung leadership to secure RAM for AI data centers

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman traveled to South Korea to meet with roughly 50 senior Samsung executives, aiming to strengthen hardware partnerships amid surging global demand for AI infrastructure. The discussions focused on expanding memory capacity and memory supply agreements for future data centers.

• The meeting took place at Samsung's Resources Development Center in Yongin.
• Executives discussed the 2025 Letter of Intent regarding the Stargate AI project.
• Altman reportedly presented a Codex Micro Keyboard to Samsung's AI Center head.
• Samsung and SK hynix account for about 83% of global high-bandwidth memory revenue.

Altman's visit follows recent controversial remarks regarding underused DRAM inside personal computers, where he argued that centralized data centers could better optimize memory sharing across complex AI workloads. Despite criticism over OpenAI's own heavy infrastructure dependence, hardware constraints remain a critical bottleneck for the industry.

Market forecasts from Trendforce indicate that DRAM supply will fall short of demand by 1% to 2%, with the imbalance threatening to persist through 2027. Micron has also warned that memory manufacturing capacity constraints could extend the global shortage well into 2028 as new fab construction takes time.

South Korea remains at the epicenter of global AI hardware manufacturing through industry leaders Samsung and SK Hynix. With high-bandwidth memory (HBM) becoming essential for advanced AI computing, competitors like AMD CEO Lisa Su have similarly visited South Korea to secure long-term component supplies.