South Korea’s AI chip giants are fighting for a bigger role in America’s AI boom — SkimNews
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- SK Hynix holds a leading position in the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) market with advanced technology and early integration with Nvidia, supplying critical memory chips for AI processors.
- Samsung has more than doubled its HBM market share over the past year, winning business from SK Hynix by forming new partnerships with Nvidia and OpenAI.
- SK Hynix broke ground in August on a $4 billion advanced packaging facility in Indiana, deepening its integration with the U.S. AI industry.
- Samsung collaborated with Nvidia in March 2025 on AI-RAN technology and joined OpenAI’s Stargate project in October 2025 to expand AI infrastructure alongside SK Hynix.
- OpenAI deployed ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to all Samsung Electronics employees in Korea and device-experience staff globally by June 2026, calling it one of its largest deployments to date.
- Samsung will receive around 50,000 of the 260,000 Nvidia GPUs allocated to South Korean firms and institutions under a national AI factory initiative that includes SK Hynix and Hyundai.
- SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron are shifting from commodity DRAM production to customized, specialized HBM offerings through long-term customer agreements amid constrained global capacity.
Why it matters: For U.S. AI leaders like Nvidia and OpenAI, the SK Hynix-Samsung rivalry determines access to a bottleneck component—HBM chips—directly affecting the speed and cost of scaling AI systems. With production capacity tight and geopolitical risks rising, control over supply becomes a strategic lever, not just a technical one.
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