Samsung SDS bets W500b on enterprise AI rollout with OpenAI resale rights in Korea

Lee June-hee, CEO of Samsung SDS, presents the company’s generative AI service framework in June 2025. (Samsung SDS)

Samsung SDS is taking a concrete step toward turning artificial intelligence interest into enterprise deployment, launching a new unit to oversee business-focused AI projects and beginning formal sales of OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise under a resale agreement that remains unique in Korea.

The announcement, made during the company's earnings call on Thursday, also included a 500 billion won ($341 million) capital expenditure plan for this year, with much of it focused on expanding the infrastructure needed to support large-scale AI workloads.

Samsung SDS is the IT services and logistics arm of Samsung Group. While much of its revenue still comes from within the conglomerate, it has been steadily building out offerings aimed at external clients, especially in areas where compliance and integration with existing systems are crucial.

The newly established AX Center for AI transformation will serve as the company's command post for enterprise AI development and implementation. The team's focus is "agentic AI" — systems that can go beyond assisting users to actually handling multistep processes on their own.

These are not consumer-facing chatbots; the enterprise tools are built to carry out tasks inside real operational environments, such as automating reporting processes for financial institutions or managing information flows in government agencies.

To make that happen, Samsung SDS is leaning heavily on its reseller agreement with OpenAI, which was signed in December and is now being put into practice. It allows the company to directly sell ChatGPT Enterprise to Korean businesses, making it the only firm in Korea with formal resale rights. Others in the market, such as LG CNS, act as service partners to support implementation, but cannot offer the software itself as a licensed product.

That distinction is commercially significant. ChatGPT Enterprise offers features tailored to large organizations, including longer context handling and enterprise-grade data protection. Samsung SDS is wrapping the product into a broader solution that includes technical support, systems integration and AI deployment consulting.

Supporting these offerings requires infrastructure. Samsung SDS said it will more than double its current data center capacity by 2029. A new 60-megawatt facility in Gumi, North Gyeongsang Province, is already underway, and the company is participating in the government-backed National AI Computing Center project, which cleared technical review late last year. The 2026 investment plan also includes purchases of Nvidia's B300 GPUs, designed for high-performance AI training and inference.

The company's financials suggest room to support the expansion. Samsung SDS reported 13.93 trillion won in revenue and 957.1 billion won in operating profit for 2025. Cloud revenue rose 15.4 percent to 2.68 trillion won, accounting for 41 percent of the company's IT services revenue, which is the highest proportion to date.

The logistics arm remained stable, despite broader market headwinds. Its digital platform, Cello Square, recorded 330.7 billion won in fourth-quarter revenue, up 8 percent year-on-year.