Much ink has been spilled writing about Samsung's challenges in the lucrative HBM3E market. It still hasn't been able to win approval from NVIDIA to supply the company with these high-bandwidth memory modules for its AI accelerators. Meanwhile, cross-town rival SK Hynix has emerged as the main supplier of HBM3E to NVIDIA.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has continued to provide Samsung with hope that its memory chips would soon pass the qualification tests. Huang has also publicly expressed support for Samsung on several occasions, most recently at CES 2025, where Huang gave the keynote address.
Samsung supplied the first-ever HBM NVIDIA used
Samsung's been trying to become a part of NVIDIA's HBM3E supply chain for about a year now. Even though its HBM3E 12H memory chip got a “Jensen approved” autograph by Huang himself at GTC 2024 in March, the approval has eluded Samsung, despite hopes being raised in June/July 2024 and as recently as November.
Huang was asked during a press interaction at CES when Samsung might begin supplying HBM3E to NVIDIA. “They are working on it,” he said, adding that “They're going to succeed. No question.” He further hyped up Samsung in a way only your best buddy would, saying “I have confidence that Samsung will succeed with HBM. I have confidence like, tomorrow is Wednesday.”
The NVIDIA boss also pointed out that Samsung has a solid legacy when it comes to HBM technology. It was the first company to create HBM and the first ever high-bandwidth memory NVIDIA used also came from Samsung. He's confident that Samsung will revive itself in this lucrative industry.
Samsung and NVIDIA have had a close relationship for many years. Even NVIDIA's latest 50-series GPUs that were unveiled at CES 2025 use Samsung's GDDR7 memory. The continued public praise from NVIDIA's boss will boost the morale of Samsung's HBM3 team as they push to clear the bottlenecks that have so far prevented the company from capitalizing on this market.
