AI-driven demand is tightening the global memory market just as China's leading DRAM producer, ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, accelerates capacity expansion after a record IPO.
AI spending is broadening the memory upcycle beyond high-bandwidth memory, lifting prices for conventional DRAM, NAND flash and enterprise SSDs while reshaping earnings at SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics.
Anthropic has asked SK Hynix to help supply chips for its own in-house AI chip production, SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won said. He made the remarks at a recent AI summit in San Francisco, where he also disclosed that South Korea's three new investment plans in semiconductor expansion, AI data centers and physical AI would total more than US$3 trillion.
Samsung Electronics is showing renewed momentum in the AI memory race as it deepens ties with both OpenAI and AMD, two partnerships that could strengthen its position in the next-generation HBM4 ecosystem after ceding early ground in AI memory to rival SK hynix.
Samsung Electronics plans to manufacture the base die for its next-generation HBM5 memory using a 2nm gate-all-around foundry process, as faster high-bandwidth memory raises pressure on logic performance, power efficiency and heat management.
SK Hynix is recruiting engineers in San Jose to co-design 3D stacked DRAM-on-logic with US customers, extending its custom memory strategy beyond high-bandwidth memory and toward on-device AI applications.
