Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have announced initial agreements to supply AI-specific chips and other gear for OpenAI's Stargate project.

Stargate is a $500-billion joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank for building artificial intelligence infrastructure. The development will make South Korea an important player in the global deployment of AI solutions.

As part of the Stargate project, OpenAI expects it will need 900,000-odd wafers' worth of high-performance DRAM each month to power ChatGPT and its other AI solutions.

According to Bloomberg, the projection for demand is more than double the current global capacity for HBM or high-bandwidth memory, underlining Stargate's scale and rapid global AI development.

The announcement followed a meeting between South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, Samsung Electronics executive chairman Lee Jae-yong (also known as Jay Y. Lee), SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the Presidential Office in Seoul.

ChatGPT's popularity has been on an upswing in Korea, where its monthly active users exceeded 20 million in August. Globally, OpenAI has 700 million weekly active users for ChatGPT, up from 500 million in March, marking a more than fourfold year-over-year surge in growth.

In late September, Nvidia, the world's most valuable publicly traded company, said that it would invest $100 billion in OpenAI, a deal that will allow the start-up behind ChatGPT to use the chipmaker's artificial intelligence semiconductors inside its data centres.

OpenAI and Nvidia are leading a global push to build data centres for a new generation of AI tools, which may cost trillions of dollars and require chips, servers, cooling systems and abundant amounts of electricity.

The agreement in Seoul will help create a long-term partnership between America's most valuable AI startup and two Asian companies that have considerable influence in the memory chip sphere.

"I hope that Samsung and SK will play a key role in the global spread of AI together with OpenAI," Myung said in the statement.

Other Samsung group companies, including Samsung SDS, Samsung C&T and Samsung Heavy Industries, will also partner with OpenAI to explore future technologies, including floating data centres and collaboration in data centre design.

The ChatGPT maker also reached a separate agreement with SK Telecom, South Korea's top wireless carrier, to explore building an AI data centre in the country.

Altman said: "Korea has all the ingredients to be a global leader in AI."