"World's First Mass Production of HBM4 After Lunar New Year"... Samsung Aims to Lead AI Memory Market

Samsung Electronics will begin the world’s first mass production of its next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for artificial intelligence (AI) chips, called HBM4, after the Lunar New Year holidays. As the global AI market is being reshaped around high-performance memory, Samsung plans to secure technological leadership by pushing its top-spec HBM4 to the forefront.
According to industry sources on the 8th, Samsung Electronics is set to start mass production of HBM4 for supply to Nvidia as early as the third week of this month. Samsung has passed Nvidia’s quality tests and secured purchase orders, and it has reportedly expanded sample volumes significantly to support testing of customers’ finished products.
HBM4 is expected to be installed in Nvidia’s next-generation AI accelerator "Vera Rubin" and is highly likely to be unveiled at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2026, scheduled for March. Samsung Electronics is said to have aligned the HBM4 mass production timeline with the planned launch schedule of Vera Rubin.
From the early stages of HBM4 development, Samsung Electronics set a goal of exceeding the performance standards of the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association (JEDEC). To achieve this, it made a strategic choice to apply both 10-nanometer-class sixth-generation (1c) DRAM and a 4-nanometer foundry process. Through this unique process combination, Samsung’s HBM4 delivers data processing speeds of up to 11.7Gbps (gigabits per second). This is 37% faster than the JEDEC standard of 8Gbps and 22% higher than existing HBM3E high-bandwidth memory at 9.6Gbps.
Memory bandwidth has also increased to as much as 3TB/s per stack, 2.4 times higher than the previous generation, and the product offers 36GB of capacity through 12-layer stacking. If 16-layer stacking is applied in the future, capacity can be expanded to 48GB.
Samsung Electronics is building a new production line at Pyeongtaek Campus Plant 4 to more than triple its HBM production capacity compared with current levels, while optimizing its overall memory production strategy with a focus on profitability. Having secured stable yields in the initial mass production phase, the company plans to continue improving quality and yield as it expands capacity, thereby increasing the supply of high value-added products to the market.
With prices for all memory products currently on the rise, Samsung is pursuing a strategy to gain the upper hand in both unit prices and market share by being the first to supply the highest-performance products to the market.
An industry official said, "Samsung has achieved world-class HBM4 performance through its unique process synergies, combining capabilities in logic, memory, foundry, and packaging," adding, "The mass production of HBM4 once again proves its technological competitiveness."

moving@fnnews.com Lee Dong-hyuk Reporter