OpenAI’s Stargate locks in Korean chipmakers, boosting shares

Two of South Korea’s biggest technology firms saw their shares jump in Seoul trading on Thursday after OpenAI announced it would enlist the country’s tech memory champions to supply its colossal 'Stargate' data-centre project.

Shares of SK Hynix surged around 10% and Samsung Electronics climbed over 3% after news broke that both Korean giants had secured a role in supplying high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for the Stargate supercomputer project.

Samsung Electronics is the world’s largest producer of memory chips, dominating both DRAM — the main working memory in computers and data servers — and NAND flash, which powers storage in everything from smartphones to data centres.

Its smaller rival SK Hynix ranks second in global DRAM output and has carved out a lead in high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the ultra-fast chips that underpin Nvidia’s AI processors.

Together, the two South Korean giants command more than half of the world’s memory market, giving them an outsized influence over pricing, capacity and the technological direction of an industry that sits at the heart of the digital economy.

The initiative, valued at as much as $500 billion (€425.3bn), is expected to fuel an unprecedented wave of capital spending across the artificial intelligence supply chain.

Locking in HBM demand

High-bandwidth memory (HBM) is crucial for AI because it allows chips like Nvidia’s to move massive amounts of data at ultra-fast speeds, needed for its ever-developing computing needs, enabling the training and deployment of large-scale models that standard memory processing cannot handle.

The Stargate project plans to set up a vast network of AI supercomputers across several continents and is expected to require hundreds of thousands of HBM wafers or stacks every month, according to industry estimates.

At those volumes, it would mark a massive change in global semiconductor capacity, reinforcing SK Hynix’s role as the leading supplier of HBM3 chips and bolstering Samsung’s efforts to expand in the next generation of HBM4.

A new AI hub in Asia

The plan also carries crucial strategic implications for South Korea itself, with Seoul long having sought to position itself as a regional technology hub beyond hardware manufacturing.

By hosting one of the largest AI infrastructure projects ever conceived, OpenAI and its US backers are reinforcing ties with a close ally but also diversifying away from China-sensitive ties in the AI technology chain.

Washington has been pushing to secure critical facilities in friendly countries, and Korea’s export-driven memory chip sector offers both scale and the necessary political alignment.