SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics secure partnership with OpenAI
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South Korean chipmakers SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics partnered with artificial-intelligence major OpenAI as part of the U.S. firm’s Stargate initiative.
OpenAI said in a statement that this partnership will “focus on increasing the supply of advanced memory chips essential for next-generation AI and expanding data center capacity in Korea.”
Developments in South Korea
The announcement came as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in Seoul, and the top leaders at Samsung and SK Hynix.
OpenAI has also signed a series of agreements to explore developing next-generation AI data centers in South Korea, including with the Korean Ministry of Science and ICT, telecommunications operator SK Telecom, as well as with Samsung subsidiaries.
Next-generation memory chips
Earlier this month, SK Hynix announced that it was ready to mass-produce its next-generation high-bandwidth memory chips, cementing its leading position in the AI value chain.
HBM is a type of memory that is used in chipsets for artificial-intelligence computing, including in chips from global AI giant Nvidia — a major client of SK Hynix.
China’s DeepSeek launches next-gen AI model. Here’s what makes it different
Chinese startup DeepSeek’s released DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp on Monday, an experimental version of its current model DeepSeek-V3.1-Terminus, according to a post on the AI forum Hugging Face.
“The big improvement is a new feature called DSA (DeepSeek Sparse Attention), which makes the AI better at handling long documents and conversations,” Adina Yakefu, Chinese community lead at Hugging Face, told CNBC.
Sparse attention
An AI model makes decisions based on its training data and new information, such as a prompt. Say an airline wants to find the best route from A to B. While there are many options, not all are feasible.
By filtering out the less viable routes, you dramatically reduce the amount of time, fuel and, ultimately, money, needed to make the journey.
That is exactly what sparse attention does. It only factors in data that it thinks is important given the task at hand, as opposed to other models thus far which have crunched all data they have.
Pros and cons
Sparse attention is a boon for efficiency, given fewer resources are needed.
But one concern is that it could lead to a drop in how reliable models are due to the lack of oversight in how and why it discounts information.
BYD monthly sales tumble for the first time in 2025, reinforcing slowdown concerns
BYD delivered 393,060 units in September, marking an almost a 6% decline from a year earlier. That’s the first time in 2025 that China’s electric-vehicle behemoth has experienced a drop in year-over-year deliveries.
That comes after the firm reportedly slashed its sales target for this year by as much as 16% to 4.6 million deliveries, amid a fierce price competition in the domestic market.
Upstarts shine
On the other hand, EV upstarts across the board set new records in their monthly car delivery numbers, with some of them buoyed by cheaper, new launches.
Leapmotor delivered 66,657 vehicles in September, increasing over 97% year on year and continuing its streak of all-time highs. The Stellantis-backed company’s latest figure also surpassed the 50,000 mark it reached in July.
In a similar beat, the Huawei-backed Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance, which includes brands such as Aito, Chery, and Maextro, set a fresh monthly record with 52,916 units across its entire series.
Milestone for Xiaomi
Xiaomi clocked a new milestone with over 40,000 units in September. Although the electric vehicle carmaker did not specify the exact numbers, the latest figure was about twice of what it delivered in January.
A top VC’s guide to Asia’s fastest-growing tech hubs
Silicon Valley once dismissed Asia’s tech scene as a land of copycats. Today, those same hubs are driving real innovation—and global investors are taking notice. One of them is B Capital, a venture capital firm managing over $9 billion across nine offices in the U.S. and Asia. In this episode, B Capital co-founder and co-CEO Raj Ganguly joins "Beyond the Valley" from Singapore to share which Asian markets excite them most and the three ways AI is reshaping the startup landscape.