Two days after arguing that the DRAM in home PCs would be put to better use in data centers, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat down with around 50 Samsung presidents on Saturday, October 31. The group went well past the chip business, with leaders from Samsung's finance and biotech arms joining the electronics side at the company's training center in Yongin. Samsung presented it as part of a leadership seminar series for its company-wide AI push, and the talks apparently covered where AI is headed, the markets it could open up, and how it changes the way large companies make decisions. According to Samsung, Altman told the room that adopting AI alone doesn't give anyone an edge, and that the payoff comes from using it to move faster and build better products.

Nothing came out of it in terms of a new supply contract, at least publicly, and Samsung's own write-up stuck to AI strategy. Still, it's hard to look at the visit separately from the memory shortage. Samsung signed a letter of intent with OpenAI back in October 2025 to act as a memory partner for Stargate, with OpenAI's demand projected at up to 900,000 DRAM wafers per month. Separately, on October 31, SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won also reportedly met Altman in Seoul, with SK hynix and SK Telecom executives joining, according to industry sources. Last month, AMD's Lisa Su spent hours with Samsung's chip chief chasing HBM supply, and amid all these meetings, Micron's CEO expects the memory crunch to get worse in 2027 and 2028. It seems like every major buyer is knocking on the same Korean doors.

Nscale Global Holdings Ltd. ("Nscale"), Aker ASA ("Aker") and OpenAI today announced the launch of Stargate Norway: an advanced AI infrastructure project in Narvik, Northern Norway. Powered entirely by renewable energy, the facility will target to deliver 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs by the end of 2026, with ambitions to scale significantly in the years ahead. Stargate Norway will be designed to provide secure, scalable, and energy-efficient infrastructure for sovereign AI workloads across Europe, fully aligned with European regulatory frameworks. The initiative is led by global AI infrastructure provider Nscale, in partnership with Aker and OpenAI.

Stargate Norway is planned to deliver 230MW of capacity, with ambitions to expand by an additional 290MW - positioning it among the most significant AI infrastructure investments in Europe. The project marks OpenAI's first data centre initiative on the continent and the inaugural European site under its 'OpenAI for Countries' program.

OpenAI and Oracle today announced a binding agreement to add 4.5 gigawatts of power-dense data center capacity to the Stargate network, pushing the project past the 5 GW milestone and keeping it on track to house over two million AI chips. While SoftBank remains a name on Stargate's January press release, the Japanese conglomerate is not contributing capital to this specific tranche, leaving Oracle as the primary financier and operator for now. The new build-out will join Stargate I in Abilene, where Oracle delivered the first NVIDIA GB200 racks last month and where OpenAI is already running frontier model training workloads. Construction crews from more than twenty states are on site, and OpenAI projects that the expanded footprint will generate over 100,000 US jobs, spanning electricians, mechanical technicians, and indirect manufacturing roles, within the next four years.

The announcement arrives less than a week after the Wall Street Journal characterized Stargate as a "stalled" venture, a claim OpenAI CEO Sam Altman swiftly rebutted on X, affirming that total investment will "significantly exceed" the originally pledged $500 billion and that GPU counts are on pace to break the two-million-chip barrier this year. Site selection for the 4.5 GW increment remains under review, with Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Wyoming under consideration. Oracle has reportedly placed a $40 billion order for additional NVIDIA silicon, showing the scale of its commitment. Power availability remains the critical constraint, as 4.5 GW equals the average draw of 3.5 million homes, prompting parallel negotiations with utilities for on-site generation and dedicated transmission lines. Abilene's H-shaped halls, each designed to hold 50,000 GB200s, serve as a live prototype, and lessons learned there, including liquid-cooling loops and modular substations, will be replicated across future campuses.