Companies making AI semiconductors need a lot of high-bandwidth memory chips, and Samsung has advanced memory chips to sell. The company has been winning major orders from leading companies as it seeks to establish a dominant position in the HBM3E segment, where local rival SK Hynix has gained a considerable market share.
A news report out of South Korea suggests that Samsung has won a $3 billion order from AMD for HBM3E memory chips that will be used in the company's new AI chip for servers, specifically the MI350.
Samsung reportedly wins $3 billion memory chip order from AMD
AMD isn't the only major company operating in this space that's opting to source HBM3E memory from Samsung. NVIDIA's CEO has made no secret of his appreciation for Samsung's high-bandwidth memory. Samsung is also said to be the exclusive supplier of 12-layer HBM3E chips to NVIDIA.
Samsung has now reportedly won a $3 billion order from AMD for the same 12-layer HBM3E memory chips that will be used in the AMD Instinct MI350 series AI semiconductors. The two companies have apparently struck a mutually beneficial deal with Samsung said to purchase AMD GPUs in exchange for its HBM products, but no specific GPU product or quantity has been specified as yet.
The 12-layer HBM3E chips from Samsung boast impressive performance, hitting up to 1280GB/s bandwidth and 36GB capacity, that's a 50% jump from the 8-layer outgoing generation. AMD's Instinct MI350, due to launch in the second of this year, will benefit immensely from Samsung's new high-performance memory solutions as it seeks to compete aggressively against NVIDIA's AI chips.
The report further mentions that this deal between Samsung and AMD is separate from discussions between Samsung Foundry and AMD for wafer production. AMD is reportedly interested in having some of its CPUs and GPUs manufactured by Samsung Foundry, but that deal has reportedly not been inked yet.
