Openai, which is making a massive splash in Openai’s American backyard with the heels of Chinese AI company Deepseek, is expanding in Asia. Business in these markets in the future.
Today, Openai announced a strategic collaboration with Kakao, a Korean high-tech company that runs Kakaotalk, one of the region’s most popular messaging apps.
The move comes a day after SoftBank announced its major commitment to OpenAI use. It allocated a $3 billion budget to deploy Openai Tech to various group operations and subsidiaries, and established a joint venture, SB Openai Japan, and built the solution. Customized for businesses in the country.
Today’s Cacao News will be announced today at an event in Seoul, co-led by Cacao CEO Shina Chung and Openai CEO Sam Altman, and will initially cover three projects.
The company plans to develop a new Korean assistant called Kanana with Openai-powered. Openai Tech will be integrated into Kakaotalk. Kakao will also become an Openai customer and use ChatGpt Enterprise internally among employees.
Meanwhile, SoftBank’s announcement is merely the latest development of what appears to be a rather deep relationship between the two companies. Softbank is also reportedly aiming for a massive investment in Openai, which has not yet been confirmed, with the two theoretically collaborating with the Stargate project to bring AI Superservers and other infrastructure to the US. We are working together to build.
On the surface, both of these partnerships are big commercial transactions, bringing Openai services to a new population of home languages.
“Korea is a very impressive market,” Altman said today at a press event. “The adoption of AI in Korea is very advanced. Considering a wide range of industries, from energy to semiconductors to internet companies, there is a very powerful environment that can help us apply AI. It’s very, very for us. It is a rapidly growing market that is important to us.
But beyond that, for both Cacao and Softbank, this transaction will benefit Openai in another very important way.
US companies continue to build and train large language models. With deals with major players in Korea and Japan, with access to millions of consumers in their respective markets, Openai gives the opportunity to unlock new language doors.
This is especially important given the Deepseek. If a Chinese AI company has proven to be more than just a flash of a virus in bread, and if it is not buried under the sea of legal issues relating to copyright, personal data protection and more – it is very clear It proves to signal Openai that the building of a company outside the US has stole a march about gaining momentum in English-generating AI.
Therefore, Openai needs to continue to expand its reach internationally, which includes in terms of its ability to work in different languages as well as in English.
That’s also worth noting because at some point SoftBank sees a very different route and is open in itself.
In 2023, she unveiled the opportunity to build for home language in the AI world, where natural language services in English are primarily dominated by. SB Intuition is intended to build LLM and generation AI in Japanese.
It’s not clear what’s going on in that business. Maybe it’s never been down from the ground, if the job gets caught up in a JV, or if something else gets caught up in it at all. We will contact the company and update it as we learn more.
(2/6/25, 2:25 PM PT: SB Intuitions continues to develop homemade LLMS exclusively for Japanese. A SoftBank spokesman told TechCrunch, SoftBank has approximately 4,000 yen on the Japanese AI computing platform. We have installed individual NVIDIA hopper GPUs. According to a press release.)
Apart from his collaboration with Cacao, Altman uses this moment to connect with other major Korean tech giants. They also held a meeting with Samsung Electronics and Korean semiconductor manufacturer SK Hynix to discuss custom-designed chips and AI-powered devices, according to local media reports. Openai has joined other tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, all developing their own in-house AI chips.
The latest strategic collaboration will take place on Monday at SoftBank the day after the announcement of Openai’s joint venture. This will spend $3 billion a year on implementing solutions for US AI companies, including products such as CHATGPT Enterprise, OpenAI APIs, operators and more across the group companies. Japanese tech giant and Openai have founded SB Openai Japan, a JV that exclusively provides enterprise technology for American AI startups to large Japanese companies.
Last week, Openai introduced operators, an agent capable of performing tasks like vacation planning and restaurant booking, and O3-Mini, the latest and most cost-effective inference model. The creators of ChatGpt have also announced a new feature called Deep Research.
ARM, a UK chip designer acquired by SoftBank in 2016, uses OpenAI tools to increase productivity with each SoftBank statement.
SoftBank is reportedly worth as much as $40 billion and could value the company at $300 billion to lead Openai’s funding round.
Separately, last month, Openai said it would work with SoftBank and Oracle to build multiple data centers for American AI and form a joint venture called Stargate Project. The project begins at a large data center in Texas. Initially, the three companies invested $100 billion in Stargate, potentially giving up to $500 billion to the project over the next four years.