By Joyce Lee and Hyunjoo Jin
SEOUL (Reuters) – Shares of SK Hynix rose more than 9% on Thursday after the South Korean company began mass production of cutting-edge high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, giving it a head start in the race to meet demand for artificial intelligence (AI).
Shares of the world’s second-largest memory chip maker outperformed those of its larger rival Samsung Electronics, whose shares rose 4% on Micron’s optimistic outlook for AI demand overnight.
SK Hynix said in a statement that it was the world’s first next-generation HBM product, called HBM3E, with 12 layers and 50% larger capacity than the previous eight-layer chips.
SK Hynix, the main supplier of HBM chips to Nvidia, said it plans to ship the latest products to undisclosed customers by the end of this year.
The competition for HBM chips is heating up. These chips help process large amounts of data to train AI technology and are crucial for Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
Samsung Electronics announced in July that it plans to ship the production-ready HBM3E 12-high units to customers in the second half of this year.
Micron reported earlier this month that it was shipping production-ready HBM3E 12-high units to key industry partners for qualification.
South Korea’s main stock index rose 1.7%.
(Reporting by Joyce Lee and Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Jacqueline Wong, Muralikumar Anantharaman and Ed Davies)
