Samsung shares surge as Nvidia tests AI memory chips

Investing.com-- Shares of Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (KS:005930) rose sharply on Wednesday after reports said artificial intelligence major NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA)  was testing high bandwidth memory chips from the South Korean conglomerate.

Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang said the firm was in the process of qualifying Samsung’s HBM chips for potential use in the future, the Nikkei reported, citing a press briefing. 

Samsung’s shares jumped 4.6% to an over 2-½ month high of 76,200 won. They also underpinned an over 1% jump in the broader KOSPI index. 

Shares of rival SK Hynix Inc (KS:000660), which is for now the only producer of the high-speed HBM3E chips, slid 2.7% after Huang’s comments. While SK Hynix already has a partnership with Nvidia, Samsung’s entry into the HBM space presents more competition. 

SK Hynix said on Tuesday it had begun volume of the next generation of HBM chips, called HBM3E. The firm’s chips will also reportedly be used in Nvidia’s new Blackwell, AI-oriented graphical processing units. 

HBM a key aspect of AI development 

HBM chips have become a hot topic in AI development, given that they help meet the memory-heavy, high processing speed requirements of running large language AI models.

Samsung had recently announced the development of HBM3E chips, as it moved to catch up with rival SK Hynix. The South Korean conglomerate, which is the world’s largest producer of memory chips by volume, said it will begin mass production of the chip within the first half of 2024.