NVIDIA's Urgent Call: SK Hynix to Expedite HBM4 Chip Delivery by Six Months Amid AI Chip Demand Surge

SK Hynix Chairman Chey Tae-won announced that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has requested the delivery date for the next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM4) chips to be moved forward by six months. This revelation came during a group AI summit held in Seoul where discussions focused on alleviating supply bottlenecks, a joint effort between SK Hynix and NVIDIA.

Originally, in October of last year, SK Hynix planned to supply HBM4 chips to clients in the second half of 2025. This request from Huang underscores the surging demand for NVIDIA's high-capacity, energy-efficient GPUs used in AI technology development, which will feature these advanced HBM chips. Currently, NVIDIA dominates over 80% of the global AI chip market, underscoring the critical nature of this supply request.

SK Hynix also shared updates on its upcoming products. The company plans to introduce 16-layer HBM3E chips in early 2025, while production of 12-layer HBM3E began in September. Looking further ahead, SK Hynix intends to launch HBM5 chips between 2028 and 2030. As a leading player in the HBM sector, these chips are essential for processing vast data quantities required for AI training, making them crucial to NVIDIA's chipsets. However, SK Hynix faces increased competition from companies like Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology.

HBM technology, which integrates multiple DDR chips stacked with GPUs, meets the massive computational and storage demands of modern AI models. Consequently, HBM is becoming pivotal in reversing fortunes for storage industry giants. Yet, capacity shortages have emerged as a bottleneck in AI chip supply, with SK Hynix's capacity already sold out until 2025, and Samsung still seeking NVIDIA's certification for its HBM products.

Amid this competitive landscape, Samsung recently reported significant progress in qualifying its HBM3E chips with NVIDIA, anticipating sales by Q4. Samsung plans to produce its next-gen HBM4 products in the latter half of next year, intensifying the battle among major chip manufacturers to secure NVIDIA's business, particularly for the cutting-edge HBM3E.