- Sam Altman is touring Asia and the Middle East to secure trillions for global AI compute infrastructure and partnerships.
- OpenAI commits $16B to server rentals, partnering with SK Hynix, Samsung, and Hitachi for chips and power gear.
Sam Altman is currently on a series of international trips to secure support for a large-scale computing infrastructure project. His journey has taken him to South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, where he convened with executives from major firms including Foxconn, TSMC, SK Hynix, and Samsung. An upcoming visit to the United Arab Emirates will center on discussions with investment groups and operational allies.
Excited to partner with AMD to use their chips to serve our users!
This is all incremental to our work with NVIDIA (and we plan to increase our NVIDIA purchasing over time).
The world needs much more compute…
— Sam Altman (@sama) October 6, 2025
A central obstacle for this initiative is the availability of electrical power, which Altman cites as a more urgent issue than obtaining semiconductors or funding. His own investment activities underscore this priority; he directed a $500M financing round for Helion Energy, a company working on fusion power, and supported the public offering of Oklo, a fission energy startup. OpenAI has dedicated $16 billion to leasing computational servers in the present year, with plans to increase this spending to $400 billion by 2029.
To accommodate this expansion, the organization anticipates requiring as many as 900K wafers each month. It has established collaborative agreements with South Korean memory chip producers SK Hynix and Samsung for component supply and shared development of data centers. A distinct arrangement with Japan’s Hitachi will furnish essential equipment for transmitting and distributing electricity.
In the UAE, Altman is scheduled to engage with representatives from the Mubadala and MGX investment funds, plus the operational partner G42. These conversations are intended to raise money for a data center initiative referred to as Stargate. This latest endeavor comes after a 2024 proposal worth $7 trillion that several industry experts initially regarded as unfeasible.
OpenAI recently solidified its standing through an agreement with Nvidia for the rental of 5 million artificial intelligence chips. Altman has articulated a goal of constructing a facility that can generate one gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week.
