(Bloomberg) — Samsung Electronics Co. pledged to strengthen its position in the high-bandwidth memory chip market this year, in response to shareholder criticism over its underperformance in the lucrative artificial intelligence arena.
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Jun Young-hyun, head of the chip business, said Samsung plans to supply enhanced 12-layer HBM3E as early as the second quarter of this year and aims to produce cutting-edge HBM4 chips in the second half. He was officially appointed as co-chief executive officer of South Korea’s biggest company following its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday.
Jun acknowledged that Samsung’s failure to secure an early lead in the HBM market contributed to it lagging behind rival SK Hynix Inc. He stressed that Samsung won’t repeat the same mistake with next-generation HBM4 and custom chips. HBM4 memory is expected to be integrated into Nvidia Corp.’s upcoming Rubin GPU architecture. SK Hynix is aggressively positioning itself as Nvidia’s primary supplier for HBM4, announcing that it has shipped the world’s first 12-layer HBM4 samples to major customers ahead of schedule.
Samsung has decided to revise the design of HBM3E chips to obtain approval from Nvidia. Nvidia’s approval has been long in the works, as Samsung strives to catch up to Hynix, Nvidia’s go-to partner for supplying the most advanced HBM to pair with its AI chips. At the CES conference in Las Vegas this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Samsung will have to engineer a new design. “But they can do it. They are working very fast. They’re very committed to do it,” he said.
Jun also projected a memory market recovery in the coming quarters, driven by strong AI and mobile demand, which he expects to boost Samsung’s earnings in the second half.
HBM is essential to high-performance computing tasks and has given memory makers a lucrative way to participate in the flood of spending on AI training and development. Unlike other types of memory, the difficulty of producing it has made it highly profitable and less susceptible to wide swings in the balance of supply and demand.
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