Samsung Electronics deploys ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to 125,000 South Korea employees in OpenAI's largest enterprise rollout

OpenAI announced on June 21, 2026 that Samsung Electronics will deploy ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex across its entire South Korea workforce of approximately 125,000 employees, plus all employees worldwide in its Device eXperience (DX) division. OpenAI describes it as one of its largest single enterprise rollouts to date.

What's new

The deployment covers ChatGPT Enterprise — the full-context, privacy-preserving enterprise version of ChatGPT — alongside Codex, OpenAI's AI software engineering agent. Samsung will roll both tools out across software development, marketing, product development, manufacturing, and corporate support functions.

Key metrics from the announcement:

• ~125,000 Samsung employees in South Korea gain access
• All Samsung DX division employees worldwide included
• Codex weekly active users in South Korea grew nearly 800% since February 1, 2026
• More than 5 million people now use Codex weekly globally

Harrison Kim, OpenAI Korea General Manager, described the significance: "This historic deployment for OpenAI is particularly significant because Samsung Electronics, a global leader in technology and manufacturing, is embracing AI not as a tool limited to certain teams or functions, but as a core platform for improving how employees around the world work and innovate."

Context

The deployment builds on a strategic relationship that began formally in September 2025, when Samsung Chairman Lee Jae-yong and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman signed a letter of intent on advanced memory chip supply for OpenAI's Stargate data center initiative. That hardware partnership now has a software counterpart — Samsung's workforce becomes one of the largest enterprise test beds for OpenAI's productivity tools.

The 800% growth in Codex WAU in South Korea since February suggests that Samsung employees were already adopting the tool organically before the formal enterprise agreement was in place. The official deployment standardizes, expands, and supports that adoption across the full organization.

Why it matters

Enterprise AI adoption at scale is one of the central open questions for the AI industry. Proof points — large organizations that have deployed AI broadly, measured results, and continued expanding — are still rare and commercially significant.

Samsung is a useful data point because it spans manufacturing, R&D, consumer electronics, semiconductors, and corporate operations. Deployment to 125,000 employees across those functions, with explicit inclusion of non-developer roles, is an argument that AI coding tools have expanded beyond their original engineering audience.

For OpenAI, the deal is strategically important beyond revenue: Samsung's global brand and scale make it a credible reference customer, and the 800% Codex growth figure gives OpenAI a real-world adoption number to cite as Codex competes with GitHub Copilot and a growing field of enterprise AI coding tools.