OpenAI's South Korea lead expressed confidence on Wednesday that demand for artificial intelligence chips will continue its upward trajectory, reaffirming the company's commitment to prioritizing collaborations with the nation's semiconductor supply chain partners.

Speaking at a press conference marking the first anniversary of the Seoul office's establishment, OpenAI Korea General Manager Harrison Kim highlighted the critical role of advanced semiconductors. "Possessing high-performance, cutting-edge chips is essential for enabling faster and more complex AI computational processing," he stated.

Following the recent debut of the GPT-6Astra model earlier this month, Kim renewed his optimistic outlook on the AI memory chip market. The model's launch fueled gains for Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, with their shares climbing over 3% and 5%, respectively, on Monday.

When questioned about the South Korean government's substantial investments in developing indigenous frontier AI models, the former Google executive expressed a "positive view" on the initiative. He noted that such efforts would not only diversify user options but also nurture the broader domestic AI ecosystem, encompassing everything from the local semiconductor supply chain to AI-related talent development.

During the event, OpenAI showcased ChatGPT's performance in South Korea over the past year. The company reported a 28-fold year-over-year surge in enterprise-tier ChatGPT model users as of the end of August. Additionally, adoption of ChatGPT Work and the Codex coding agent skyrocketed 14-fold over the six months starting in March.

Data also revealed that weekly active users of the general ChatGPT model in the country grew 35% year-over-year as of August 25. OpenAI anticipates these growth trends will accelerate further with the deployment of GPT-6Astra.

The company is actively advancing support for localized inference deployment and collaborating with domestic firms to expand its cybersecurity initiative, the "Daybreak Partner" program. OpenAI added that it plans to enlarge its local team focused on advertising operations, having already introduced an ad-supported AI service for the basic tier of ChatGPT in South Korea in mid-June.