SK Hynix's chairman, Chey Tae-won, announced that NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, has requested an acceleration of the next-generation HBM4 memory chip supply by six months. The announcement was made at an AI summit in Seoul, where SK Hynix is collaborating with NVIDIA to address supply bottlenecks.
Originally, SK Hynix had planned to supply the HBM4 chips to customers in the latter half of 2025. The request for expedited delivery underscores the strong demand for NVIDIA's GPUs that are integral to developing artificial intelligence, powered by these new HBM chips. Currently, NVIDIA accounts for over 80% of the global AI chip market.
In addition to this, SK Hynix unveiled its roadmap for next-generation products. The company plans to release 16-layer HBM3E chips in early 2025, following the mass production of 12-layer HBM3E chips since September. SK Hynix also aims to launch HBM5 chips between 2028 and 2030. The company has been a leader in the high-bandwidth memory space, which is critical for handling large data volumes essential for AI training. However, competition from companies like Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology is increasing.
High-bandwidth memory (HBM) is a new type of memory chip that integrates multiple DDR chips with a GPU to achieve high capacity and bandwidth. This capability is crucial for the demands of high compute power and storage requirements in the era of large AI models. As a result, HBM is becoming a pivotal technology for major players in the memory industry.
There is a bottleneck in HBM production capacity, posing a challenge to AI chip supply. For instance, SK Hynix's capacity is already sold out through 2025, while Samsung is working to obtain NVIDIA's certification for their HBM products. However, during a recent earnings call, Samsung's memory business executive vice president, Jaejune Kim, reported significant progress in the certification process with NVIDIA. Samsung anticipates selling its most advanced HBM3E memory chips in the fourth quarter. Samsung also plans to produce the next-generation HBM4 products in the latter half of next year.
