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The head of artificial intelligence computing giant Nvidia has asked South Korea’s SK hynix to accelerate delivery of its newest and most advanced HBM4 chips by six months, the head of SK Group said on Monday.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made the order amid a global shortage of critical advanced chips, which SK has pledged to work on with fellow market leader TSMC of Taiwan.
SK hynix, the world’s second-largest memory chip maker, is racing to meet huge demand for HBM chips that are used to process massive amounts of data to train artificial intelligence, including from Nvidia, which dominates the market.
“The current pace of HBM memory technology development and product launches is impressive, but AI still requires higher-performance memory,” Huang said via video link at the AI Summit in Seoul.
The company said last month that it was on track to deliver 12-layer HBM4 chips by the second half of 2025.
SK hynix also said on Monday that it will ship samples of its first 16-layer HBM3E chips by early 2025, as it seeks to consolidate its growing dominance in AI chips.
“Nvidia is demanding more from HBM because it releases better versions of chips every year,” said Chi Tae-won, CEO of SK Group.
He said it was a “happy challenge” that kept his company busy.
The company said it was mass producing the world’s first 12-layer HBM3E product in September, and now aims to ship samples to customers of the newer, more advanced products very quickly.
Additional layers add more bandwidth speed, power efficiency, and improve the overall capacity of the chips.
“SK hynix is poised for several ‘world firsts’ by being the first in the industry to develop and begin shipping in bulk,” said Kwak Noh Jung, CEO of SK hynix.
“SK hynix has developed 48GB and 16GB HBM3E in an effort to ensure technological stability and plans to provide samples to customers early next year,” Kwak added.
In 2013, SK hynix launched the first high-bandwidth memory chips, an advanced semiconductor that enables faster data processing and more complex tasks for generative AI.
Rival Samsung lags behind SK hynix when it comes to HBM chips, and the market capitalization gap between Samsung Electronics and SK hynix reached a 13-year low in October.
SK Hynix shares rose 6.48 percent on Monday.
© 2024 Agence France-Presse
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