Highlights for this morning: OpenAI launches AI capacity contract, Samsung faces strike action

OpenAI announced the launch of Guaranteed Capacity, an offering that allows companies to pre-book computing capacity years in advance. A strike by 48,000 Samsung employees threatens the global supply of memory chips and the economy of South Korea. These and other topics are covered in our review of key events on the morning of Ma. 20.

OpenAI has announced a new offering for businesses - Guaranteed Capacity - that will allow companies to pre-book computing capacity for AI products and agents for one to three years, CNBC reports. The longer the contract lasts - the bigger the discount. CEO Sam Altman said that demand for AI capacity continues to grow rapidly and the market will continue to experience a shortage of computing resources for a long time to come.

The new model should help OpenAI better plan its infrastructure and increase revenue ahead of a possible IPO. The company expects to spend about $600 billion on computing power by 2030 and promises to keep enough resources for its own services, such as chatbot ChatGPT and AI agent Codex.

Samsung Electronics union announced plans to hold an 18-day strike of nearly 48,000 employees after the failure of bonus negotiations, Reuters reports. The workers are demanding that the cap on bonuses of 50% of annual salary be lifted and that 15% of the company's operating profit be allocated to bonuses. Samsung shares were falling about 3% in Korea on the back of this news, but then slowed down and are losing about 1.6% at the time of publication.

South Korean authorities warned over the weekend that they could intervene and launch emergency arbitration to prevent production stoppages. Samsung accounts for nearly a quarter of the country's exports and is the world's largest memory chip maker, so the outage could hit global semiconductor supplies amid the AI boom.

Alibaba said its new Zhenwu M890 AI chip was three times more powerful than the previous generation chip, CNBC reports. The processor received 144 GB of GPU memory (the amount of high-speed memory right on the chip) and chip-to-chip communication speeds of up to 800 GB/s. The company said it has already shipped more than 560,000 chips to customers in 20 industries.

Amid US restrictions and Nvidia's problems with supplying advanced chips to China, Alibaba is stepping up its bet on its own AI infrastructure. The company also announced the imminent release of a new language model Qwen3.7-Max and recalled the launch of a joint data center with China Telecom based on its own processors.

SpaceX's IPO, which could come as early as June at a valuation of about $1.75 trillion, could be the largest ever in terms of returns for early investors, The Information reported. Valor Equity Partners and Founders Fund could earn more than $60 billion each, and Sequoia Capital could earn more than $20 billion.

Peter Thiel's Founders Fund invested more than $600 million in SpaceX back in 2008 and owns about 3.5% of the company. Valor Equity, associated with Elon Musk's longtime partner Antonio Gracias, controls about 4% of SpaceX. Sequoia entered the project later, in 2020, when SpaceX was valued at $36 billion, but retained the entire stake.

Forecasting platform Polymarket has begun launching contracts linked to private companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, CNBC reports. Users will be able to bet on their future valuations, IPO timing and secondary market events, though they won't directly own shares in the companies.

Data for calculating contracts will be provided by Nasdaq Private Market, which for the first time will open up some of the information on company valuations for free. Among the bets already available are OpenAI's IPO with a valuation above $1 trillion by 2027 and Anthropic reaching a $500 billion valuation in 2026. The project reflects growing investor interest in private companies, which are usually only accessed by funds and big players.

- Japan's broad Topix index was down 1.8 percent on May 20, while the Nikkei 225 was down 1.5 percent.

- Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index was down 0.6 percent, while mainland China's CSI 300 Index was down 0.1 percent.

- In South Korea, the Kospi index was down 2.1 percent and the Kosdaq was down 3.3 percent.

- Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was down 1.4 percent.

- Futures on S&P 500 were falling by 0.1%. Futures on Nasdaq Composite - did not change. Exchange contracts on Dow Jones Industrial Average were declining by 0.1%.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor