Ming-Chi Kuo has been tracking an OpenAI smartphone since last month, when he first pegged mass production for 2028. That window just got pulled forward — significantly. His latest note puts it in the first half of 2027, which is a pretty aggressive shift for a device that didn’t officially exist until fairly recently.
Two things are driving the faster pace, according to Kuo: the AI phone market heating up faster than expected, and a possible OpenAI IPO before year’s end. Whether those two factors are connected or just happened to land at the same time isn’t totally clear, but either way, the pressure to ship something is apparently real.
On the hardware side, MediaTek is expected to be the sole chip supplier. The SoC in question is a customized Dimensity 9600, built on TSMC’s N2P process — that production is expected to start in the second half of this year. Dual-NPU setup for AI workloads, LPDDR6 RAM, UFS 5.0 storage. The security specs include pKVM and inline hashing, which is more specific than what you usually see at this early a stage.
Camera is apparently a priority. Kuo mentions an enhanced HDR pipeline in the ISP aimed at improving what he calls “real-world visual sensing” — which reads like the phone is meant to perceive its environment, not just photograph it. Makes sense for an AI agent device.
If everything stays on schedule, Kuo projects 30 million units shipped across 2027 and 2028 combined.
