Korea’s tech titans—Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix—are now at the heart of OpenAI’s Stargate project, supplying up to 900,000 wafer starts per month, representing nearly 40 percent of global DRAM output.
This staggering capacity commitment transforms South Korea into a strategic AI manufacturing hub. The initiative, dubbed “Stargate Korea,” combines cutting-edge memory production with local AI data-center builds, aligning compute and storage physically for efficiency and resilience.
For South Korea, this partnership elevates the nation from semiconductor leader to AI infrastructure sovereign—a nation producing the memory that fuels global intelligence systems. For OpenAI, it diversifies its hardware dependencies, building a multi-continent training lattice less vulnerable to geopolitical shocks.
Stock markets immediately responded: Samsung and SK Hynix shares spiked on the announcement, confirming investor recognition that AI is the new industrial revolution—and memory is its steel.
Key Takeaway
The OpenAI–Korea partnership cements a new era of compute diplomacy, where memory, data centers, and energy grids replace oil as the strategic resources of power.
