Much ink was spilled while writing Samsung’s problems in the lucrative HBM3E market. The company has still not been able to get approval from NVIDIA to supply the company with these high-bandwidth memory modules for its artificial intelligence accelerators. Meanwhile, its competitor SK Hynix became the main supplier of HBM3E for NVIDIA.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang continues to give Samsung hope that its memory chips will soon pass qualification tests. Huang has also publicly expressed his support for Samsung on several occasions, most recently at CES 2025, where Huang delivered the keynote address.
Samsung delivered the first ever HBM that NVIDIA used
Samsung has been trying to become part of the NVIDIA HBM3E supply chain for about a year now. Despite the fact that its HBM3E 12H memory chip received autograph “Jensen approved” by Huang himself at the GTC 2024 in March, approval eluded Samsung despite hopes arise in June/July 2024. And just recently, in November.
Juan was asked during a press conference at CES, when Samsung may begin shipping HBM3E to NVIDIA. “They are working on it,” he said, adding that “they will succeed. No questions asked. He went on to hype Samsung the way only your best friend would, saying, “I’m confident Samsung will succeed with HBM. I’m sure tomorrow is Wednesday.”
The NVIDIA executive also noted that Samsung has a strong heritage in HBM technology. It was the first company to create HBM, and the first high-speed memory used by NVIDIA was also made by Samsung. He is confident that Samsung will make a comeback in this lucrative industry.
Samsung and NVIDIA have maintained a close relationship for many years. Even NVIDIA Latest 50 Series GPUs which were presented at CES 2025 use Samsung GDDR7 memory. Continued public praise from the NVIDIA executive will boost the morale of Samsung’s HBM3 team as they look to remove the bottlenecks that have so far prevented the company from capitalizing on this market.