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.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
A proposed 100 percent tariff on chip imports announced by US President Donald Trump could shift more of Taiwan’s semiconductor production overseas, a Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) researcher said yesterday. Trump’s tariff policy will accelerate the global semiconductor industry’s pace to establish roots in the US, leading to higher supply chain costs and ultimately raising prices of consumer electronics and creating uncertainty for future market demand, Arisa Liu (劉佩真) at the institute’s Taiwan Industry Economics Database said in a telephone interview. Trump’s move signals his intention to "restore the glory of the US semiconductor industry," Liu noted, saying that
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
STILL UNCLEAR: Several aspects of the policy still need to be clarified, such as whether the exemptions would expand to related products, PwC Taiwan warned The TAIEX surged yesterday, led by gains in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), after US President Donald Trump announced a sweeping 100 percent tariff on imported semiconductors — while exempting companies operating or building plants in the US, which includes TSMC. The benchmark index jumped 556.41 points, or 2.37 percent, to close at 24,003.77, breaching the 24,000-point level and hitting its highest close this year, Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) data showed. TSMC rose NT$55, or 4.89 percent, to close at a record NT$1,180, as the company is already investing heavily in a multibillion-dollar plant in Arizona that led investors to assume
RSS