SK, OpenAI heads discuss AI infrastructure investment

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won (right) and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman walk together after a 50-minute meeting at The Plaza Hotel in Jung-gu, Seoul, on February 4. (Han Joo-hyung)

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won met with Open AI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman in San Francisco last week to discuss investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.

This marked the second meeting between Chey and Altman in 2025 to date, following one in Seoul in February, and their third since June 2024 in San Francisco. SK hynix Inc. CEO Kwak Noh-jung also attended, likely to discuss SK hynix’s high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a key component in Nvidia Corp.’s graphic processing units (GPUs) used for AI training by OpenAI and a major growth driver for SK hynix. OpenAI is the world’s largest user of GPUs.

On Sunday (local time), Altman posted on X that the company “will cross well over 1 million GPUs brought online by the end of this year,” adding that while he is “very proud” of the team they “better get to work figuring out how to 100x that.” OpenAI is also developing its own in-house application-specific integrated circuit (ASCI) in partnership with Broadcom Inc.

During the meeting, Chey invited Altman to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit scheduled for October in Gyeongju, South Korea.