South Korea's Samsung chief inspects HBM lines amid AI race
· UPIJune 23 (Asia Today) -- Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Jay Y. Lee visited the company's Cheonan campus Tuesday for the first time in more than three years to inspect high-bandwidth memory packaging operations as competition intensifies in the market for artificial intelligence chips.
Lee toured the C1 and C2 production lines at the campus in Cheonan, about 53 miles south of Seoul, Samsung Electronics said.
After receiving briefings on plant operations, production plans and technology development, Lee put on a cleanroom suit and inspected an HBM packaging line. He reviewed the operation's production capacity and quality control systems.
The Cheonan campus is a major production center for Samsung's HBM back-end processing and advanced packaging.
HBM is made by vertically stacking multiple dynamic random-access memory chips and connecting them to provide the high-speed data transfer required by AI accelerators.
Unlike conventional memory products, HBM performance and production yields depend heavily on advanced packaging, including the processes used to connect, assemble and test the stacked chips.
Lee's visit came as Samsung seeks to strengthen its position in the next generation of HBM after falling behind SK hynix in the HBM3 and HBM3E markets.
Samsung began mass production and commercial shipments of its sixth-generation HBM4 in February, describing the achievement as an industry first.
The company followed in May by shipping samples of its 12-layer HBM4E, a seventh-generation product, to major global customers.
Industry sources said Samsung's HBM4 sales surpassed $1 billion about four months after shipments began. Sales are projected to exceed $1.2 billion by the end of June.
Some industry estimates project that Samsung's HBM4 revenue could surpass $10 billion by the end of 2026 as the company expands production. Samsung has not publicly confirmed either sales figure.
The company has said it expects its total HBM sales to more than triple this year compared with 2025.
Market observers said SK hynix maintained an advantage in the previous HBM generations, particularly through its supply relationship with Nvidia. They said the competitive landscape could change as Samsung expands HBM4 production and more technology companies develop their own AI accelerators.
Samsung's broad semiconductor portfolio, which includes memory, logic chips, foundry manufacturing and advanced packaging, could help it serve Nvidia, other chip designers and hyperscale data center operators developing customized AI systems.
An industry official said Samsung's competitiveness could become more apparent as companies including Google, Meta and Microsoft increase development of in-house AI chips.
Samsung also unveiled its Universal Flash Storage 5.0 solution Tuesday as it seeks to expand its memory business beyond AI servers and into devices capable of running AI applications locally.
The company said the new storage product achieves data transfer speeds of up to 10.8 gigabytes per second, more than twice the sequential read speed of its previous-generation UFS 4.1 technology.
Samsung said the product's power efficiency improved by more than 40% from UFS 4.1, which could help smartphones, wearable devices and extended-reality products run AI applications while reducing battery consumption.
The company plans to begin mass production of UFS 5.0 products in the fourth quarter, with capacities of up to 1 terabyte.
Industry officials said HBM4 and UFS 5.0 demonstrate Samsung's strategy of supplying memory products for both cloud-based AI infrastructure and consumer devices running AI applications.
"In the AI era, a comprehensive memory portfolio is becoming more important than competitiveness in any single product," an industry official said.
The official said Samsung's progress in HBM4 and UFS 5.0 could strengthen its ability to serve markets ranging from AI data centers to smartphones and extended-reality devices.
-- Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI
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Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260624010008193