In October 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman flew to Seoul and signed letters of intent with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix — the world’s two largest memory chipmakers — targeting 900,000 DRAM wafer starts per month. Analysts estimated that volume at roughly 40% of global supply. South Korean President Lee Jae-myung stood alongside the chipmakers and OpenAI at the announcement. Contract DRAM prices surged in the aftermath.
Both agreements were letters of intent — preliminary expressions of interest carrying no enforceable purchase obligation and no requirement to deliver or receive a single chip.
The market did not read them that way. Micron shuttered Crucial, its 29-year-old consumer memory brand, in December 2025, citing AI-driven demand and redirecting its entire wafer allocation toward enterprise and data center customers. Other manufacturers tightened supply. Consumers and hardware builders faced price increases across the board, with fewer options and no timeline for relief.
Five months after the Seoul signing, the demand signal those agreements created is unraveling. In March 2026, Oracle and OpenAI scrapped plans to expand their flagship Stargate data center campus in Abilene, Texas, after the two companies failed to reach agreement on financing terms and OpenAI revised its capacity requirements multiple times. The Abilene expansion would have grown the site from 1.2 gigawatts to 2 gigawatts of capacity — the same buildout the memory agreements were designed to serve.
OpenAI has pulled back on other major commitments in parallel. The company also closed Sora, its Disney-backed AI video platform, as it moved to bring escalating costs under control. Investor scrutiny over OpenAI’s spending trajectory has intensified as projected costs continue to climb.
Samsung and SK Hynix together control roughly 78% of global DRAM production. A demand signal at that scale — even non-binding — reshaped manufacturer priorities, supply allocations, and pricing across the entire memory chain. Micron’s exit from consumer memory reflected how seriously the industry internalized the commitment.
An analyst cited by The Telegraph cautioned that if OpenAI’s contracts go unfulfilled and the company scales back investment, memory prices will ease — a development that would benefit consumers but would also expose how much of the recent shortage rested on demand that never fully materialized.
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