The head of artificial intelligence (AI) computing giant Nvidia Corp asked South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc to speed up delivery of newer, more advanced HBM4 chips by six months, SK Group said yesterday.
Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) made the request amid a global shortage of crucial advanced chips, which SK Hynix has pledged to work on with fellow market leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電).
SK Hynix, the world’s second-largest memorychip maker, is racing to meet explosive demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that are used to process vast amounts of data to train AI, including from Nvidia, which dominates the market.
Photo: Bloomberg
“The current pace of HBM memory technology development and product launches is impressive, but AI still requires higher-performance memory,” Huang said by video link at an AI summit in Seoul.
Last month, SK Hynix said that it was on course to deliver the 12-layer HBM4 chips by the second half of next year.
SK Hynix yesterday said that it would ship samples of the first-ever 16-layer HBM3E chips by early next year, as it seeks to bolster its growing AI chip dominance.
“Nvidia is demanding more HBM as it releases better chip versions every year,” SK Group chief executive officer Chey Tae-won said.
It was a “happy challenge” which kept the company busy, he added.
The company said it was mass-producing the world’s first 12-layer HBM3E product in September, and aims to ship samples to clients of the newer, more advanced products quickly.
The additional layers add more bandwidth speed, power efficiency and improve the total capacity of the chips.
“SK Hynix has been preparing for various ‘world first’ products by being the first in the industry to develop and start volume shipping,” SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung said.
“SK Hynix has been developing 48GB [gigabyte] 16-high HBM3E in a bid to secure technological stability and plans to provide samples to customers early next year,” he added.
In 2013, SK Hynix launched the first HBM chips — cutting-edge semiconductors that enable faster data processing and the more complex tasks of generative AI.
Rival Samsung Electronics Co has been lagging behind SK Hynix when it comes to HBM chips, and the market capitalization gap between Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix reached its narrowest level in 13 years last month.
SK Hynix’s shares yesterday rose 6.48 percent, while Samsung Electronics increased 0.69 percent.
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