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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang requests SK Hynix to expedite HBM4 chip supply by six months, aiming for 2025 delivery amidst AI boom

As the demand for AI chips is increasing, South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix has been asked by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to hasten its timeline. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won discloses that Jensen Huang urged them to speed up and meet the deadline to deliver their next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, HBM4, within six months. The timeline to deliver HBM4 had been scheduled for the second half of 2025 and moved up according to Huang's request.

Moreover, SK Hynix announced last month that it expects to ship HBM4 chips in the latter half of 2025. A company official confirmed the new timeline on November 03 but said that timeline is more aggressive than SK Hynix initially aimed for, and refused further comment on the change.

At the SK AI Summit 2024 in Seoul, SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung also spoke of its current products and future ones. At this event, he hinted at the plans to ship its first 12-layer HBM3E chip to an anonymous customer before the end of this year. Additionally, Kwak also stated that in early 2025, SK Hynix will release samples of its 18-layer HBM3E chip.

The memory market's other major competitor, Samsung Electronics, shared its views on the HBM technology it had developed. Last month, Samsung said that it was moving forward on a supply contract with an unnamed leading client following setbacks and announced that it was in talks with leading clients to start producing “improved” HBM3E chips during the first half of next year. Samsung also unveiled other plans to start mass production of the HBM4 chip in the second half of 2025, which also aligns with an accelerated schedule announced by a rival of the company, SK Hynix.

This huge growth in artificial intelligence applications demanding more rapid data processing is what has propelled the demand for high-bandwidth memory chips. Both SK Hynix and Samsung, the major suppliers of high-performance memory chips, would profit from this rising demand.

In response, the shares of SK Hynix surged by 5.1% while that of Samsung moved 1%. The benchmark South Korean market (.KS11) also rose, this time by 1.6%.