AI Daily: OpenAI in talks with SoftBank, Samsung about Stargate

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

STARGATE DISCUSSED: OpenAI said on Tuesday it will develop artificial intelligence products for South Korea with chat app operator Kakao, unveil a second major alliance with a high-profile Asian partner this week, Reuters’ Hyunjoo Jin reports. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman also separately sat down with the leaders of Samsung (SSNLF), SoftBank (SFTBY) and Arm Holdings (ARM) in Seoul. SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son told reporters the Stargate AI data center project in the United States had been discussed, the author notes.

DEEP RESEARCH: Commenting on OpenAI unveiling of “Deep Research,” its new agentic capability that conducts multi-step research autonomous, running up to 30 minutes per prompt to produce PhD-level analysis, Wells Fargo says it sees this as further validating Nvidia’s (NVDA) vision of test-time scaling. Further, the firm argues that this is an important validation that test-time scaling is here to stay and why it has become a key point of emphasis in Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s recent presentations as the next phase of AI model plus compute scaling. Wells continues to see dramatic improvement in chain-of-thought/reasoner models and expect this rapid pace of development to continue with the upcoming release of several frontier models.

Broadly, the firm views this release as positive for compute providers like Nvidia as it thinks the scaling of test-time compute will continue to drive advances in AI. This release leads Wells to believe AI compute budgets will continue to expand as end-users are provided with more concrete economic value for their AI investments. Additionally, it expects compute spending to shift faster towards inference as reasoner adoption accelerates.

STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP: Sunnova Energy International (NOVA) announced a strategic partnership with OpenSolar, a software innovator empowering solar installers with the world’s only free-of-charge solar design, sales, and project management platform. OpenSolar’s design software, including its automated AI design technology, is now available within the Sunnova Catalyst dealer platform. The collaboration underscores Sunnova’s commitment to innovation, delivering cutting-edge solar and storage systems for homeowners and businesses. “I’m excited that we’ve been able to take our market-leading design accuracy and incorporate artificial intelligence to automatically generate lightning-fast solar system designs,” said Andrew Birch, Co-Founder and CEO of OpenSolar. “Sunnova’s leading network of dealers will be the first to experience this technology anywhere in the world, benefiting its teams and customers.”