Samsung Electronics Co. Chairman Lee Jae-yong discussed potential collaboration for the Stargate AI initiative with OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son on Tuesday, said Son.
At Samsung’s headquarters in Seocho-gu, Seoul, the three companies’ leaders began talks about Samsung’s possible participation in the Stargate Project, Son told reporters.
Jun Young-hyun, vice chairman and head of Samsung’s semiconductor business, joined the meeting. But no further details were provided.
The Stargate Project, announced in January, is a venture with SoftBank and Oracle to spend $500 billion in building new AI data centers for OpenAI in the US. The move was seen aimed at curbing China’s rise in AI.
The Tuesday meeting was arranged on short notice following an appellate court’s verdict that acquitted Samsung’s Lee of all criminal charges – a ruling that will remove long-running legal risks he has faced for a decade.
Son flew to Seoul on Tuesday to join the three-way meeting with Samsung.
Before the meeting with Lee, widely known by his English name Jay. Y Lee, and Son, Altman said in a joint press conference with Kakao Corp. that several South Korean companies could contribute to the Stargate Project, when asked whether Korean companies would be involved in the AI initiative.
However, the ChatGPT maker will keep talks about partnerships for the Stargate Project confidential until it is finalized, he added.
THREE-COUNTRY ALLIANCE?
Industry observers see the three-way gathering as a signal that Samsung will accelerate cooperation with OpenAI and SoftBank’s subsidiary ARM, a semiconductor intellectual property (IP) licensing firm.
With OpenAI developing AI chips using ARM’s IPs, it may need to collaborate with Samsung in the fields of the semiconductor foundry and high-bandwidth memory, so-called AI chips.
Their possible collaboration could herald an AI alliance among South Korea, Japan and the US to counter China’s growing influence in AI following the January lauch of DeepSeek, China’s generative AI tool comparable to ChatGPT.
KAKAO’S PARTNERSHIP WITH OPENAI
Early on Tuesday, OpenAI’s Altman announced a strategic collaboration with Kakao Corp. in a joint press conference with the indisputable No.1 mobile platform in South Korea. Under the partnership, Kakao became OpenAI’s first South Korean strategic partner.
Kakao will integrate OpenAI’s most advanced application programming interface tailored for third-party developers, into its major services like KakaoTalk messenger and Kanana, alongside its own large language model.
Kanana is Kakao’s first conversational AI-agent integrated messenger app that understands both one-on-one and group conversations, providing context-based responses.
Kakao will also adopt ChatGPT Enterprise to accelerate its transformation into an AI native company. ChatGPT Enterprise offers enterprise-grade security, privacy and unlimited higher-speed access to GPT-4, the fourth in the series of GPT.
They will cooperate in advancing AI services and developing joint AI products to make AI services more easily accessible.
“We’ll drive the widespread adoption of AI services by delivering innovative customer experience through collaboration with OpenAI,” Chung said in the joint press conference.
Since September last year, Kakao has been discussing collaboration with OpenAI to develop technology and pursued joint business opportunities.
By Eui-Myung Park and Hyun-Woo Oh
uimyung@hankyung.com
Yeonhee Kim edited this article.
