Tech Giants Unite: Samsung Joins OpenAI’s $500 Billion AI Revolution With Floating Data Centers and Memory Chips

In a historic partnership that could redefine the future of artificial intelligence, South Korean technology giant Samsung has signed a comprehensive agreement with OpenAI, coming together to construct the enormous infrastructure required to fuel the next generation of AI systems. The partnership, which was legally committed through a letter of intent that was signed on October 1, 2025, involves several Samsung divisions and OpenAI in what the industry refers to as one of the biggest AI infrastructure deals in history.

The collaboration includes Samsung Electronics, Samsung SDS, Samsung C&T, and Samsung Heavy Industries, all of which are integral to OpenAI’s ambitious Stargate project a whopping $500 billion undertaking to build AI data centers in the United States over the course of four years.

This news comes at a time when the competition to construct AI computing power has hit a fever pitch, with corporations across the globe fighting to acquire the chips, energy, and premises necessary to train ever-more advanced artificial intelligence models.

The Stargate Project: AI’s Moonshot Moment

The Stargate Project is OpenAI’s promise to spend $500 billion in four years on the construction of new AI infrastructure in the United States, with $100 billion spent right away. Announced first on January 21, 2025, by President Donald Trump at the White House, the project is led by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, with Oracle and SoftBank as major partners to OpenAI

The scope of this effort is hard to exaggerate. Building has already commenced on the initial data centers in Abilene, Texas, with completion anticipated before the end of 2025. Five more locations have been publicized in Texas, New Mexico, Ohio, and a Midwestern location to be revealed, taking the present pipeline to almost 7 gigawatts and over $400 billion in investment within three years.

To give this some context, one gigawatt of data center capacity takes huge resources hundreds of thousands of homes worth of electricity, gargantuan cooling systems, and footprints of buildings that stretch across millions of square feet. Stargate is designing infrastructure that can house the training and operation of AI systems much more capable than current-day capabilities.

Samsung’s Multi-Faceted Role

Samsung’s role in this gargantuan endeavor stretches across several fronts, each department contributing specialized strengths to the effort.

Samsung Electronics will provide OpenAI with low-power memory chips to make it easy for the ChatGPT operator to access memory solutions. This is important with the existing shortage of high-performance memory chips worldwide, which has become the constraint in AI technology. Large language models such as GPT-4 and their future generations have enormous memory requirements for training, where specialized chips are needed to support gigantic amounts of data transfer at high speeds using less power.

The memory supply deal is aimed at filling a key weakness in OpenAI’s growth strategy. As AI models increase in size and power, they need exponentially more memory to run. Industry estimates put the number of specialized chips needed to train state-of-the-art AI models at thousands of chips running in parallel, with memory bandwidth usually being the bottleneck in speed.

Samsung SDS will offer businesses consulting, deployment and management services for adopting OpenAI’s models in their internal systems, and has become a designated reseller of OpenAI’s services in Korea to help local companies adopt ChatGPT Enterprise. This aspect of the partnership moves beyond mere infrastructure, as Samsung is acting as a bridge between OpenAI’s technology and the Korean business community.

For Korean businesses, it translates to greater access to leading-edge AI products with local expertise and support. Samsung SDS has decades of history assisting firms in the installation of intricate technology systems, and leveraging that experience in AI adoption may speed the spread of the technology to Korean industry.

The Floating Data Center Innovation

Arguably the most interesting aspect of the Samsung-OpenAI collaboration is the joint work on floating data centers a science fiction-sounding technological advancement that solves very real problems for the AI sector.

Old-fashioned data centers have several limitations. They take huge tracts of land, usually in places with access to power grids and fiber optic networks. They produce tremendous amounts of heat, and so need advanced cooling systems that tend to stress local water supplies. And they have to contend with complicated zoning requirements and environmental permits before the construction starts.

Floating data centers have the potential to address several of these issues at once. Located on offshore platforms or repurposed ships, these centers could:

Have unlimited cooling: Seawater offers virtually unlimited cooling capacity, potentially saving millions of dollars in energy costs compared to conventional air conditioning setups.
Avoid land shortage: Where land is tight and expensive in highly populated areas, offshore sites provide vast amounts of space.

Samsung Heavy Industries adds shipbuilding and offshore platform capability to this effort, with Samsung C&T adding construction and engineering competence. If the project pans out, floating data centers may represent a new standard for AI infrastructure, especially in areas where land is scarce or there are plentiful offshore renewable energy resources.

The Broader Context: An AI Infrastructure Arms Race

Samsung’s alliance with OpenAI is not a standalone one. It is part of an overall trend of huge investments in AI infrastructure across the world as firms struggle to establish the computing power necessary to develop next-generation artificial intelligence.

The agreement also involves SK Hynix, another Korean maker of memory chips, further highlighting the middle position of Korea in the world’s AI supply chain. Samsung and SK will be major suppliers for the Stargate project, with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix contributing billions of dollars’ worth of chips.

The involvement of multiple Korean tech giants in OpenAI’s infrastructure plans highlights an important geopolitical dimension to AI development. While much attention focuses on US-China competition in artificial intelligence, the reality is that AI supply chains are global, with critical components coming from multiple countries. Korea’s dominance in memory chip manufacturing makes companies like Samsung and SK Hynix indispensable partners for any organization building large-scale AI systems.

What This Means for the AI Industry

The Samsung-OpenAI collaboration marks a few significant trends in the artificial intelligence sector.
For one, it shows that developing next-generation AI takes much more than mere software skills. The physical infrastructure data centers, chips, cooling equipment, power supplies is just as significant as the algorithms themselves. Firms such as OpenAI, which began as pure AI research firms, now have very substantial stakes in hardware and infrastructure planning.

Second, the investment scale continues to rise exponentially. It was remarkable in 2019 when OpenAI closed its Series C funding, in that the company had raised more than a billion dollars. Today, individual infrastructure projects range in hundreds of billions. Such a capital scale puts competition for the frontier in AI development only in the hands of the biggest tech companies, sovereign wealth funds, and state-backed initiatives.

Third, the partnership paradigm is now becoming normative for AI. Instead of any one firm attempting to dominate the whole stack from chips to data centers to software, we’re witnessing intricate webs of partnerships. OpenAI collaborates with Samsung on memory, Oracle on data center operations, and several other firms on various pieces of the puzzle. The ecosystem model might hasten innovation but also instills dependencies that might become liabilities.

Challenges Ahead

While there is a lot of hype around this collaboration, much lies ahead. Sizing data centers to the extent Stargate has planned calls for not only capital but also time, permits, power infrastructure, and qualified labor.

The semiconductor business is already thin on supply against existing demand, and increasing production enough to serve OpenAI will push manufacturing margins to hit their limits
The floating data center concept, while innovative, remains largely unproven at commercial scale.

Regulatory frameworks for offshore computing facilities may not yet exist in many jurisdictions, potentially creating legal uncertainties.
Environmental issues also hang in the balance.

While island data centers may address some cooling problems, they pose new questions about ocean heating, effects on sea life, and carbon costs of construction and powering. When AI’s power consumption faces greater scrutiny, such projects will be under pressure to prove real sustainability.

The Road Forward

The partnership with OpenAI by Samsung is a wager that the future of artificial intelligence is contingent on record-breaking scale. By signing up to provide memory chips, construct floating data centers, and offer enterprise integration services, Samsung is putting itself at the heart of the AI revolution.

For OpenAI, having secure partners for key components of critical infrastructure minimizes risk in its ambitious expansion strategy.

For the industry as a whole, this deal establishes a new standard for the amount of investment necessary to get into the AI game. It portends that the chasm between big AI players and everyone else will only grow wider, since only those with deep pockets and infrastructure can afford to train the most sophisticated models.

A New Era of Computing

As construction teams start building huge data centers in Texas and engineers conceptualize floating platforms that might shelter tens of thousands of AI chips, the Samsung-OpenAI alliance represents a turning point in the history of computing.

What is evident now is that firms shaping the future of AI are thinking larger and acting faster than they ever have. The alliance of Samsung and OpenAI, combining Korean manufacturing muscle and American AI ingenuity, is a new paradigm of global cooperation in the quest for artificial intelligence that has the potential to revolutionize almost every industry.

For Samsung, it is a chance to be more than an infrastructure supplier to assist in designing the infrastructure that will drive the next tech revolution.

For OpenAI, it is an important milestone on the road to securing the resources to carry out its mission of making artificial intelligence work for all of humanity. And for the rest of us, it’s a glimpse of just how seriously the world’s biggest tech companies are taking the future of AI and how far they’re willing to go to design it.