Altman meets Samsung executives as memory shortage squeezes the hardware market

What is physically scarce here is memory: DRAM, the chips that act as a computer’s short-term workspace. On Saturday, October 31, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat down with about 50 Samsung Group executives at a training center in Yongin, south of Seoul, to talk AI and memory supply.¹²

The official agenda was broad. Samsung’s statement framed the talks around how AI will reshape industries and corporate decision-making over the next decade, under the theme “The Next 10 Years Shaped by AI: The Enterprise’s Choice.”²³ But the backdrop is blunt: shortages across a wide range of memory products are straining the electronics industry and sending chip prices soaring.²

The numbers explain why. The five biggest players in the AI infrastructure race plan to spend more than $3 trillion in the coming years, and memory makes up roughly a third of data-center spending.² When buyers that large compete for the same chips, everyone else queues behind them.

The OpenAI-Samsung relationship was already deep. In October 2025, Samsung Electronics signed a letter of intent to supply advanced memory for OpenAI’s Stargate project, a $500 billion effort to build AI data centers.⁴³ That 2025 announcement also named SK Hynix as a partner, and the two chipmakers planned to scale toward 900,000 high-bandwidth DRAM chips per month, which SK Group said would be more than double the industry’s current capacity for that type of memory.⁴ Other Samsung affiliates signed on to explore data center development, including floating offshore facilities.³

Samsung is also a customer: it began rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to employees in June, and it aims to finish AI training for all staff by February 2027.³

For PC and console buyers, the chain is simple. Memory is a shared pool of manufacturing capacity, and the sources describe demand from data-center operators as intensifying competition for supply.² SK Hynix has warned the crunch could last beyond 2030, and Samsung’s chip profit has jumped 250-fold on the shortage, which tells you who holds the pricing power right now.² Executives across the industry have said production is struggling to keep pace with demand.²

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and AMD’s Lisa Su have each visited South Korea twice since last year to shore up supply ties.² That is a lot of airfare spent by companies that are, in theory, the ones with the money.

Think of memory fabs like a single busy kitchen: when one huge catering order takes over every burner, the lunch counter waits.

Our read: Altman flying in to meet 50 executives at once suggests memory is now a strategic input, not a commodity line item. Consumer gear sits at the back of that queue, and nothing in these reports suggests relief soon. Watch what Samsung and SK Hynix say about capacity expansion, because that, not any single deal, decides how long prices stay painful.

On the bench: if you are planning a PC build, a laptop, or a console upgrade, expect RAM and storage to stay expensive and tight. Buy the capacity you actually need now rather than waiting for a price drop that the industry itself says may not come.

Footnotes

1. Tom’s Hardware, “Sam Altman meets with Samsung leadership to secure more RAM for data centers amid crushing shortages”. Retrieved November 1, 2026. ↩

2. Yahoo Finance, “OpenAI’s Altman meets Samsung executives as chip crunch deepens”. Retrieved November 1, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. The Korea Herald, “Samsung executives meet OpenAI’s Altman to discuss AI strategy”. Retrieved November 1, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. TechCrunch, “OpenAI ropes in Samsung, SK Hynix to source memory chips for Stargate”. Retrieved November 1, 2026. ↩ ↩²