Demand for General DRAM Soars in Q3... Samsung Electronics to Benefit Most - KB Securities

[Financial News] An analysis has emerged that Samsung Electronics will benefit the most as the demand for general DRAM surges from the third quarter of this year.
Kang Da-hyun, a researcher at KB Securities, said in a report on the 15th, "The demand in the general server sector is exceeding expectations in the third and fourth quarters of this year, especially the demand for general DRAM from hyperscalers (companies that build and operate large-scale data centers and computing infrastructure) is soaring," and explained, "This is because investment in AI servers has been concentrated since 2023 following the active construction of servers due to the growth of the cloud market in 2018, delaying the replacement of general servers."
Researcher Kang said, "Considering that the memory replacement cycle for general servers is usually five years, the recent increase in memory demand for general servers at the current point, which has passed seven years, is likely to continue until the second half of next year, considering the arrival of the replacement cycle," and predicted, "Samsung Electronics, which has secured abundant production capacity for general DRAM, is expected to benefit the most from the supply shortage."
He added, "Although demand for general DRAM exceeding expectations is occurring from the second half of 2025 centered on servers, the current three DRAM companies are only focusing on expanding high-bandwidth memory (HBM) production capacity," and "They are not considering additional new expansions other than process conversion."
He also noted that NVIDIA's demand for speed increase over HBM power efficiency was another favorable factor. Researcher Kang predicted, "In the case of North American HBM suppliers, it is estimated that they focused on high power efficiency from the early stages of development, and it is expected that there will be difficulties in supplying to NVIDIA in the future," and "Considering the past cases where most of the demand was concentrated on high-performance GB300 after the release of GB200 and GB300, it is expected that NVIDIA will focus on expanding shipments of HBM4 with a speed of 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) in the future. Korean HBM suppliers, including Samsung Electronics, are expected to benefit."

kjh0109@fnnews.com Kwon Jun-ho Reporter