Nvidia’s chief asks SK hynix to advance supply of HBM4 chips by 6 months – report

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said that Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang asked SK hynix to speed up the supply of its next-generation high-bandwidth memory chips, HBM4, by six months, Reuters reported.

South Korean chipmaker SK hynix said in October that it intended to supply the chips to customers in the second half of 2025. A spokesperson for SK hynix noted that this timeline was faster than initially targeted, without disclosing anything more, the report added.

The Nvidia chief’s request for faster delivery suggests demand for higher capacity, energy-efficient chips used in the company’s graphic processing units, or GPUs, utilized for developing AI products.

The market for HBM is led by South Korean companies SK hynix and Samsung (OTCPK:SSNLF), and to a lesser extent by American chipmaker Micron Technology (MU). In September, SK hynix’s said it began mass production of the world’s first 12-layer HBM3E product with 36GB capacity, the largest capacity of existing HBM to date.

SK hynix — which supplies Nvidia (NVDA) with HBM chips — had noted that it plans to supply the mass-produced products to customers by the end of the year.

The company also planned to deliver samples of more advanced 16-layer HBM3E early next year, CEO Kwak Noh-Jung, had said at the SK AI SUMMIT 2024.

Last week, while reporting its third quarter results, Samsung said it plans to focus on producing high-end chips and was making progress on a supply deal with a major customer. In August, Samsung had responded to conflicting media reports regarding Nvidia testing its HBM chips, telling Seeking Alpha that testing was going “as planned.”

Samsung also plans to produce the next-generation HBM4 products in the second half of next year, according to the report.