Commentary: Nvidia CEO visit spotlights Samsung in HBM supply race - digitimes

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's recent multi-day visit to South Korea brought the competitive 'triangle relationship' between Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and NVIDIA in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) supply ... Read original →

Jensen Huang’s Korea tour is a strategic hedge against HBM supply fragility. While SK Hynix dominates NVIDIA’s HBM3E orders via superior yields, Samsung’s aggressive push into 2.5D/3D TSV and hybrid bonding is reshaping the tech race at the process level. This pressures upstream equipment vendors—ASML, Tokyo Electron—to prioritize EUV and thermo-compression bonding tools for Korean fabs, shifting CoWoS packaging gravity toward Seoul. Geopolitically, the U.S.-Korea semiconductor alliance lowers export control risks compared to Taiwan, China. Yet if Samsung fails to solve TSV stacking yield issues before HBM4, it risks relegation to secondary supplier status. Over the next 18 months, NVIDIA will lock in capacity through prepayments and co-development deals, forcing both Korean giants into a capital-intensive tech sprint where survival hinges not on innovation alone, but balance sheet resilience.