Samsung Rebuts HBM3E Failure Claims, Cites Smooth Testing

Earlier reports indicated that Samsung’s HBM3E chips encountered significant issues during NVIDIA’s verification tests, including overheating and excessive power consumption. Since last year, Samsung has been providing HBM3 and HBM3E chips to NVIDIA for verification, but they have not passed the tests.

According to Business Korea, Samsung released a statement to the media denying the previous reports, stating that it is “smoothly conducting tests for HBM supply with various global partners“, and emphasized continuous collaboration to ensure product quality and reliability, aiming to provide the best solutions to customers.

With the rapid growth of the artificial intelligence (AI) market, HBM technology, which significantly enhances data processing speed through vertical stacking of multiple DRAM chips, has become increasingly important. The surge in demand for HBM products has intensified the market competition among Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. Although Samsung has long led the DRAM market, it has been overshadowed by SK Hynix in HBM products, and Micron’s recent advancements have also posed a challenge. This has prompted significant strategic shifts within Samsung, including changes in department heads, accelerated project development, and expanded production capacity to better address competitive pressures.

In its first-quarter financial report for 2024 released last month, Samsung announced that it began mass production of the 8-layer vertically stacked HBM3E in April and plans to start mass production of the 12-layer vertically stacked HBM3E in the second quarter, ahead of the originally planned timeline for the latter half of the year. Despite these efforts, some market analysts remain skeptical about whether Samsung can narrow the gap with SK Hynix in the short term.