Two of Samsung's top rivals have joined forces to make it difficult for the company to establish its dominance in the next-generation memory chip market. TSMC, which leads the foundry market that Samsung is working so hard to capture, and SK Hynix, a cross-town rival that has taken the lead in high-bandwidth memory solutions, have announced their partnership today.
The companies confirmed that they will be working together to develop next-generation chips for AI. They'll also work on high-bandwidth memory solutions, a segment where Samsung is pouring a lot of its resources.
Samsung's rivals are joining forces to achieve HBM dominance
While Samsung remains the world's leading supplier of memory products, SK Hynix has been able to get a jump on the company in the high-bandwidth memory segment that's seeing high demand now due to the rapid advancement of AI.
No surprise, then, that SK Hynix confirmed today that it's working with TSMC to produce next-gen HBM4 chips. TSMC's advanced packaging technology will enable these AI chips and GPUs to achieve greater efficiency on the AI solutions that use these chips.
Under this collaboration, SK Hynix will proceed with its development of HBM4 chips that are expected to enter mass production by 2026. “With this cooperation in place, we will strengthen our market leadership as the total AI memory provider further by beefing up competitiveness in the space of the custom memory platform,” said Justin Kim, president and head of AI Infra at SK Hynix.
These two companies will initially focus on improving the performance of the base die that's at the very bottom of the HBM package. They'll also work together to optimize the integration of the HBM with TSMC's 2.5D packaging process.
Even though it has lagged behind SK Hynix in HBM, Samsung now has a renewed sense of urgency to compete and dominate in this market. It's pouring a lot of investment towards AI memory chips and the company has already developed the industry's first 12-stack HBM3E DRAM. Looking ahead, Samsung is expected to seriously compete with its rivals in this segment, so this collaboration between SK Hynix and TSMC couldn't have come at a better time for those companies.
