Nvidia supplier SK Hynix’s shares rally as mass production of latest HBM chips begins By Reuters

Written by Joyce Lee and Hyunjoo Jin

SEOUL (Reuters) – Shares of SK Hynix jumped more than 9 percent on Thursday after the South Korean company began mass production of its most advanced high-bandwidth memory chips, advancing in a race to meet demand from the artificial intelligence boom.

Shares of the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker outperformed bigger rival Samsung Electronics Co (KS:), which rose 4%, also helped by bullish AI demand forecasts from Micron (NASDAQ:) overnight.

This is the world’s first product of the latest generation of HBM chips, called HBM3E, with 12 layers and 50 percent more capacity than previous eight-layer chips, SK Hynix said in a statement.

SK Hynix, which has been a major supplier of HBM chips to Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVIDIA), said it plans to supply the latest products to unidentified customers by the end of this year.

Competition is heating up for HBM chips, which help process massive amounts of data to train AI and are essential to Nvidia’s GPUs.

Samsung Electronics said in July that it plans to supply high-quality, production-ready HBM3E 12 modules to customers in the second half of this year.

Micron said earlier this month that it is shipping 12 high-capacity HBM3E modules to key industry partners for qualification.

South Korea’s benchmark stock index rose 1.7%.