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Nvidia supplier SK Hynix unseats Samsung as world’s DRAM chip leader on AI boost
SK Hynix seized 36 per cent of global DRAM sales in the March quarter to surpass Samsung, which had led the market for more than 30 years
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The coming earnings results of SK Hynix are likely to show it replaced Samsung Electronics as the world’s top vendor of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) for the first time in the two companies’ decades-long rivalry, thanks to demand for artificial intelligence (AI).
SK Hynix, a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory to Nvidia, captured 36 per cent of the global DRAM market in the March quarter, compared with Samsung’s 34 per cent share, data from Counterpoint Research show.
This comes just after operating profit at Samsung, which held the DRAM crown for more than 30 years, fell below SK Hynix’s for the first time in the December quarter.
“It’s another wake-up call for Samsung,” said MS Hwang, research director at Counterpoint Research in Seoul. SK Hynix’s lead in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, used for AI, likely comprised a bigger part of the company’s operating income during the period, he said.
DRAM is a type of memory most commonly used to process data in computers and servers. HBM chips are made up of DRAM dies stacked on top of each other, which boosts the amount of data they can handle and are crucial for hardware like Nvidia’s graphics accelerators to train AI models.
On Thursday, SK Hynix is projected to report a 38 per cent quarterly rise in sales and a 129 per cent surge in operating profit in the three months to March, according to analysts polled by Bloomberg.
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