Samsung to produce AMD and Nvidia HBM base dies in Texas — Maeil - UA.NEWS

Samsung's move to fabricate HBM base dies in Texas is not a capacity play—it is a strategic decoupling of the most logic-intensive layer of the HBM stack from Korean soil. The base die, housing DRAM controllers and I/O logic on 3nm/2nm nodes, is the "brain" of the stack and carries far greater process complexity than the DRAM dies themselves. Samsung is effectively weaponizing its foundry capability to build a geopolitical moat around its memory business. For SK Hynix, this is a surgical strike. By leveraging CHIPS Act subsidies to dilute capex and wearing the "domestically manufactured" label to sidestep tariff and export-control friction, Samsung re-enters the Nvidia and AMD HBM3E/HBM4 order books from a position of regulatory advantage. Expect Hynix to accelerate US packaging commitments and Micron to compress Samsung's window with its existing domestic fabs. The 12-to-24-month inflection: HBM4 base dies will evolve toward ASIC-like integration, pushing nodes to 2nm. At that point, "where the base die is fabricated" will carry more strategic weight than "where the DRAM dies are stacked." The HBM supply chain will fracture from a Korean-centric model into a tripartite topology—logic in the US, memory in Korea, packaging distributed. Samsung's Texas base-die line is the first domino in that fracture.