Sam Altman landed in Korea late on the night of October 30 and was gone by the afternoon of October 31. In the roughly 16 hours in between, the OpenAI chief lectured about 50 presidents of Samsung Group affiliates, handed them a miniature keyboard built for his company’s coding agent, and had lunch with the chairman of SK Group.
What happened
The main event was a Saturday morning session at the Samsung Human Resources Development Institute in Yongin, south of Seoul, billed as a “Samsung Group Presidents’ Forum with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.” The theme, loosely translated from the Korean, was “The Next Decade Reshaped by AI: Corporate Choices.” Roughly 50 presidents from Samsung’s electronics, financial and biotech affiliates attended, including Samsung Electronics co-CEOs Jun Young-hyun (who runs the chip business) and Roh Tae-moon (who runs phones and appliances), along with the heads of Samsung SDI and Samsung Electro-Mechanics.
Altman brought four senior OpenAI executives with him, including hardware vice president Richard Ho and chief people officer Arvind KC. His message to the room, as relayed by Samsung, was that simply using AI will no longer be enough to hold a competitive edge; what matters is whether a company uses it to move faster and build better products than its rivals.
The souvenir drew the most attention. Altman presented the executives with a “Codex Micro Keyboard,” a compact device designed for working with Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent. The pitch, per The Herald Business, is that once people talk to computers, “you may not need an entire keyboard.” Handing a company that makes keyboards, phones and laptops a gadget with almost no keys is either a gift or a warning, depending on how you read it.
A meeting with Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong was reportedly not on the schedule, though the two met in San Francisco in July. Before flying out, Altman had lunch with SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, whose SK hynix is the other Korean memory giant.
Why the chip crunch is the real backstory
The friendly lecture sits on top of a very commercial relationship. Samsung Electronics and OpenAI signed a letter of intent in October 2025 to cooperate on global AI infrastructure, and Samsung has since been working to supply memory chips for Stargate, OpenAI’s enormous data-center buildout. Samsung SDS signed on for data-center construction and enterprise AI services, and Samsung C&T and Samsung Heavy Industries agreed to develop floating offshore data centers with OpenAI.
Bloomberg framed the visit against a deepening global memory shortage: demand from data-center operators is pushing chip prices up across a wide range of memory products, memory accounts for roughly a third of data-center spending, and the five biggest AI infrastructure spenders plan to lay out more than $3 trillion in the coming years. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and AMD’s Lisa Su have each visited Korea twice since last year to shore up supply ties. In that light, a surprise trip by the man whose company needs more memory than almost anyone looks less like a courtesy call and more like supply-chain diplomacy.
Samsung’s own AI homework
The forum was also the capstone of what Samsung calls its “AX” (AI transformation) program for leadership. Before Altman spoke, the presidents completed a hands-on generative AI training session, their second this year, in which they practiced turning management documents into a personal “knowledge repository” and using it for decisions. Samsung says it has trained about 2,300 executives so far and plans to finish AI training for its entire workforce by February, with each affiliate setting up a dedicated AI unit.
For context: Samsung Group is a federation of dozens of affiliates (electronics, insurance, shipbuilding, construction, biotech) that together make up a large slice of Korea’s economy, so a change in how its presidents work tends to ripple outward. This was also Altman’s first trip to Korea since October 2025; a planned June visit was called off after the birth of his second daughter, and OpenAI sent other executives instead.
What to watch next: whether the Stargate memory supply talks turn into firm, published volumes, and whether Samsung’s offshore data-center concept with OpenAI moves past the drawing board.
Sources
- The Herald Business — OpenAI’s Altman tells 50 Samsung presidents: ‘Next 10 years belong to AI’
- Seoul Economic Daily — OpenAI’s Altman Returns to Samsung, Discusses AI Future With 50 Executives
- Bloomberg — OpenAI’s Altman Meets Samsung Executives as Chip Crunch Deepens
- SBS News — Sam Altman Makes Surprise 2-Day Visit to Korea… Gifts ‘Codex Keyboard’ to Samsung Executives