Nvidia has requested SK Hynix to accelerate the supply of HBM4 chips, highlighting the urgent market demand for AI chips.

Accelerated Supply Schedule

On Monday, Director of South Korea's SK Hynix Group, Choi Tae-young, revealed that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had requested SK Hynix to advance the supply of its next-generation high-bandwidth memory chip, HBM4, by six months.

He stated: "Every time Nvidia launches a new GPU, they ask us for more HBM and urge us to speed up production. SK Hynix has promised to make efforts to meet the demand."

In March this year, SK Hynix began supplying Nvidia with the fifth-generation HBM3E chips for the first time, and recently commenced mass production of its advanced 12-layer HBM3E chips.

According to previous plans, SK Hynix is expected to ship 12-inch high-end HBM4 products next year and introduce 16-inch high-end HBM4 products by 2026.

However, a recent SK Hynix spokesperson stated that this schedule is faster than the original target, but did not provide further details.

Hwang Ren Xun's request to speed up delivery highlights the market's demand for higher capacity, more energy-efficient chips from NVIDIA's graphics processing units for developing AI technology.

Currently, NVIDIA holds over 80% of the global AI chip market.

Choi Tae-yuan also emphasized the close cooperation with Taiwan Semiconductor, stating: "Even if you can design high-performance chips, if you cannot manufacture them, it's useless. SK Hynix is ​​working with NVIDIA and Taiwan Semiconductor to jointly address the shortage of AI chip supply.

Intensifying competition

SK Hynix has been leading the global competition to meet the explosive demand for HBM chips, which help process large amounts of data to train AI technology, crucial for NVIDIA.

SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung stated that the 16-layer HBM market is expected to emerge from HBM4, but SK Hynix has already developed the 48GB 16-layer HBM3E in advance, and plans to provide samples to customers in early 2025.

However, SK Hynix is facing increasingly fierce competition from competitors such as Samsung Electronics and Micron.

Last week, Samsung Electronics stated that after experiencing delays, it is making progress on supply agreements with a major undisclosed customer, and mentioned that it is negotiating with key customers to produce 'improved' HBM3E products in the first half of next year.

In addition, Samsung also plans to produce the next generation HBM4 products in the second half of next year.