OpenAI's chief executive spent the weekend in South Korea shoring up the memory supply his data-centre plans depend on. Sam Altman's visit was unannounced: on October 31 he addressed roughly 50 senior Samsung executives at the company's training centre in Yongin, in a speech titled 'The Next 10 Years Changed by AI, Corporate Choices,' and held separate discussions with SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won and executives from SK Hynix and SK Telecom. Samsung confirmed its meeting; SK Hynix told CNBC it could not confirm the lunch.

No new supply agreement came out of the trip. The meetings build on the October 2025 Stargate letters of intent under which Samsung and SK Hynix agreed to supply memory for OpenAI's infrastructure, including a production target equivalent to as many as 900,000 DRAM wafer starts per month — a target, not a binding order. What has changed since is bargaining power: Samsung and SK Hynix together control most of the world's high-bandwidth memory, Samsung has said its 2027 HBM supply is sold out, and SK Hynix has said production through 2029 is effectively accounted for.

The pressure behind the trip is cost as much as volume. Research firm TrendForce forecasts HBM's blended average price could rise 121% in 2027, and the visit landed in the same news cycle as reports that OpenAI has cut its current fundraising target from $30 billion to about $20 billion — a figure OpenAI has not confirmed, and which the Wire tracks separately as an unresolved rumor. Neither Samsung nor SK disclosed any new investment commitment or pricing terms from the weekend.