OpenAI · Nvidia · TSMC · Samsung · Semiconductor · South Korea · The Register
Samsung to help fortify OpenAI's semiconductor supply chain
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Semiconductor supply chains are hard, but Samsung offers OpenAI relief in many forms spanning compute and memory.
Key facts
- OpenAI will design its next-generation AI accelerators with the help of South Korean foundry giant Samsung Electronics
- Detailed at Hot Chips last month, OpenAI’s Jalapeño AI inference chip uses HBM4, the same tech used by AMD and Nvidia’s latest GPUs
- Smaller, less popular options include Samsung Electronics and Intel Foundry
- While the most obvious reason for OpenAI’s tie-up with Samsung is memory-related, that’s not to say they couldn’t fab their next chip on Samsung’s 2 nm process tech to have an alternative supplier
Summary
OpenAI will design its next-generation AI accelerators with the help of South Korean foundry giant Samsung Electronics. The announcement, made by OpenAI Korea general manager Harrison Kim in a press conference Wednesday, comes weeks after the company showed its first-generation “Jalapeño” accelerators besting Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs across a slew of inference workloads. "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," he said, . But now that the hype has died down and Wall Street has convinced themselves that the rise of AI ASICs isn’t the threat to Nvidia’s dominance they feared, OpenAI still has to contend with the realities of being a fabless chip designer.