There’s growing evidence that OpenAI wants to build its own smartphone.
And according to Ming-Chi Kuo’s report, the company isn’t going at it alone. It has brought on chip giants Qualcomm and MediaTek as partners, along with manufacturing specialist Luxshare.
The report says company believes the only way to deliver that kind of service properly is to control both the operating system and the hardware. No other device captures a user’s real-time situation, location, and habits as well as a smartphone does. That live information is exactly what an AI agent needs to be useful.
Plus, even with all the new gadgets out there, phones remain the biggest product category by a long shot.
The OpenAI phone will reportedly split the work between the device itself and the cloud. Simple, always-on tasks, like understanding what you are doing at any moment, will run locally on the phone. That means the processor has to be smart about battery life, memory, and running small AI models efficiently.
For heavier jobs, like deep analysis or creating long pieces of text, the phone will pass those to the cloud.
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OpenAI is allegedly aiming at the high end of the smartphone market first, which sells about 300 to 400 million units every year. If people start replacing their phones more often because of better AI features, that could add a lot of extra demand for these chips.
As one of the leaders in artificial intelligence, OpenAI has a few clear advantages. It has a well-known brand, years of user data, and some of the best AI models in the world. Smartphone hardware is already very mature, so the company can lean on existing supply chains instead of starting from zero.
On the business side, OpenAI might sell the phone with a subscription bundle. It could also build a new ecosystem where developers create AI agents for different tasks, similar to how app stores work today.
Kuo says Qualcomm and MediaTek will help design the processor inside the phone. The final decisions on specs and suppliers should be made by late 2026 or early 2027.
The OpenAI Agentic AI smartphone is expected to hit mass production in 2028.
Via: CNET