Samsung will sell a bunch of shovels to OpenAI for the AI gold rush

Sell shovels in a gold rush, as the saying goes, is about providing essential services to people who are competing with others to uncover immense riches. That's basically what the AI market is nowadays and companies who are supporting them with memory chips, infrastructure, and energy are the modern day shovel makers.

There are many companies under Samsung's umbrella that can provide those services to AI companies, and a few of them have signed a Letter of Intent with OpenAI, one of the world's leading AI firms and the entity behind ChatGPT.

A signing ceremoney was conducted today between OpenAI and Samsung Electronics, Samsung SDS, Samsung C&T and Samsung Heavy Industries today in South Korea. It was attended by top executives from both sides, including OpenAI's Sam Altman and Samsung's top boss Jay Y. Lee.

Samsung Electronics will fulfill OpenAI's insatiable demand for advanced semiconductors, with the firm expected memory demand slated to hit up to 900,000 DRAM wafers per month. Samsung Electronics' will offer its services across the memory, logic, and foundry segments.

Samsung SDS and OpenAI will work to jointly develop AI data centers and to provide AI services to businesses. This Samsung company has considerable experience in building advanced data centers and will lend this expertise to support the design, development, and operation of OpenAI's Stargate AI data centers.

Samsung C&T and Heavy Industries will work with OpenAI on global AI centers. They'll particularly focus on floating AI data centers, which are technically more challenging to deploy, but have considerable benefits for space, cooling costs, and carbon emissions.

Image credit: Samsung