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Samsung Electronics to Begin World's First HBM4 Mass Production After Lunar New Year Holiday…Seizing Initiative in Next-Generation Market

Samsung Electronics will become the world's first to mass-produce and ship the next-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), HBM4—a 'game changer' for artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductors with the world's highest performance—after the Lunar New Year holiday.

This strategy aims to overcome the setbacks with previous-generation products that sparked crisis concerns in its semiconductor business, seize the initiative in the next-generation market, and solidify its position as the world's number one memory manufacturer.

According to industry sources on the 8th, Samsung Electronics has decided to begin mass production shipments of HBM4 to NVIDIA after this Lunar New Year holiday, possibly as early as the third week of this month.

Samsung Electronics passed quality tests with NVIDIA early on and received purchase orders (PO), and reportedly finalized this schedule after comprehensively considering NVIDIA's launch plans for the 'Vera Rubin' AI accelerator that will incorporate HBM4.

The volume of HBM4 samples Samsung Electronics is supplying for customer product module testing is also observed to have expanded significantly with this PO.

NVIDIA is expected to unveil 'Vera Rubin' featuring Samsung Electronics' HBM4 for the first time at its technology conference 'GTC 2026' next month.

This marks the world's first mass production shipment of next-generation HBM4.

Moreover, Samsung Electronics' HBM4 is evaluated as having world-class performance.

From the start of HBM4 development, Samsung Electronics set its goal to achieve top performance exceeding JEDEC (international semiconductor standards organization) standards.

Accordingly, it made the bold move of simultaneously applying 1c (10nm-class 6th generation) DRAM and 4nm foundry process to this HBM4.

With this industry-unique process combination, Samsung Electronics' HBM4 achieves data processing speeds of up to 11.7 Gbps (gigabits per second), surpassing the JEDEC standard of 8Gbps.

This represents a 37% improvement over the JEDEC standard and 22% over the previous generation HBM3E (9.6Gbps).

Additionally, Samsung Electronics' HBM4 achieves memory bandwidth of up to 3TB/s per single stack, a 2.4-fold improvement over its predecessor, and offers capacity of up to 36GB with 12-layer stacking technology.

Future application of 16-layer stacking technology could enable capacity expansion up to 48GB.

It can significantly reduce power consumption and cooling costs for servers and data centers through low-power design while maximizing computational performance.

Samsung Electronics, as the world's only semiconductor company capable of providing one-stop solutions encompassing logic, memory, foundry, and packaging, plans to leverage the synergy between its advanced memory and foundry process capabilities to deliver top-tier HBM performance.

The company also expects HBM sales volume to increase more than threefold year-over-year this year and has decided to install new production lines at its Pyeongtaek Campus Plant 4 to expand HBM production capacity.

Following the achievement of stable yields despite applying cutting-edge processes and commencing mass production shipments, yields are expected to improve further as production scales up.

Furthermore, Samsung Electronics is likely to establish optimal HBM4 production plans based on thorough review of overall memory market conditions.

In a situation where prices are soaring not only for HBM but all memory products, the company intends to efficiently distribute and utilize its world's largest production capacity.

This confidence is also based on the belief that Samsung Electronics can control market share while maintaining leadership, given that its HBM4 enters the market first with top performance.

An industry official stated, "Samsung Electronics, with the world's largest pr[...]

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