OpenAI appears to be fast-tracking its plans for an AI-enabled smartphone, partially in a bid to bolster its IPO that might land as soon as this year. And, in its urgency, OpenAI appears to be settling on a customized version of MediaTek's upcoming flagship Dimensity 9600 chip as the SoC of choice for the planned smartphone.
OpenAI's smartphone will use a customized version of the Dimensity 9600 chip, replete with a dual-NPU architecture and enhanced HDR for real-world visual sensing
The famous analyst Ming-Chi Kuo revealed towards the end of April that OpenAI had relegated its planned range of consumer devices to the proverbial cryo unit for now, focusing its efforts instead on an AI-powered smartphone.
At the time, Kuo had indicated that OpenAI was already working with Qualcomm and MediaTek on a dedicated smartphone processor, with Luxshare likely to serve as the key assembler of the smartphone that appears poised to challenge the dominance of the Apple iPhone.
According to OpenAI's vision of its planned smartphone, users would rely on real-time AI agent inference using a combination of on-device and cloud-based models, rather than individual apps, to perform a variety of productivity tasks.
Under OpenAI's vision, the smartphone's hardware will power the collection of a given user's "full real-time state," deal with memory hierarchy management, and furnish the requisite computing power for on-device inference, with complex tasks offloaded to the cloud for further processing.
Now, however, Ming-Chi Kuo has issued a critical update to his late-April disclosure, reporting that OpenAI appears to have settled on a customized version of MediaTek's upcoming Dimensity 9600 chip as the SoC of choice for its planned smartphone.
Do note that MediaTek is set to debut two versions of its Dimensity 9600 chip later this year: vanilla and Pro. It is as yet unclear whether OpenAI is leaning towards the former or the latter.
For the benefit of those who might not be aware, the Dimensity 9600 chip will leverage TSMC's N2P node. Moreover, the Pro version is expected to sport 2x ARM C2-Ultra cores (clocked at around 5GHz), 3x ARM C2-Premium cores, and 3x ARM C2-Pro cores, emulating the 2+3+3 CPU architecture of Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chip.
While the vanilla version is expected to sport the Mali-G2 Ultra GPU, the Dimensity 9600 Pro is expected to go with an ARM Magni GPU. Of course, this remains subject to change.
Coming back, Kuo asserts that OpenAI's customized version of the Dimensity 9600 chip will sport an improved ISP, one that features an enhanced HDR pipeline for real-world visual sensing. It will also sport a "a dual-NPU architecture for heterogeneous AI compute, LPDDR6 + UFS 5.0 to ease memory bottlenecks, and pKVM + inline hashing for security."
Finally, Kuo believes OpenAI can sell around 30 million units of its new smartphone between 2027 and 2028 if development remains on track.
About the author: Writing is my one incontrovertible passion. Over the past six years, he has authored over 2,200 distinct articles on financial and tech-related topics, spanning nearly 1 million words. And he has been a member of Wcctech mobile team since 2025. As an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce Program, I bring nuance, in-depth knowledge, and a unique perspective to every topic that I cover. When I'm not writing, I'm traveling the world, exploring hidden confectionaries and restaurants as an aspiring food connoisseur.
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