SK hynix agrees to Nvidia's request to accelerate HBM4 delivery

SK hynix has agreed to a request by Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, to move up the delivery of high bandwidth memory 4 by six months.

SK Chairman Chey Tae-won speaks during SK AI Summit 2024 held at Coex, southern Seoul, on Monday. [SK]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang urged Korean chipmaker SK hynix to accelerate the delivery timeline for its high bandwidth memory 4 (HBM4) by six months ahead of the initially agreed schedule, according to SK Chairman Chey Tae-won on Monday.

“So we agreed to try and shorten the timeline by six months,” Chey said during his keynote speech for SK AI Summit 2024 held at southern Seoul’s Coex.

“Now I’m a bit nervous to meet Huang again,” Chey said half-jokingly. “We’re worried he might ask us to speed it up even further.”

Huang appeared in an interview clip prepared by SK on the rising importance of HBM chips to advance machine learning.

“The work we did with HBM memories has really made it possible for us to achieve what appears to be super Moore’s Law because we’re simultaneously reducing the numerical precision, moving to a more structured way of processing the matrix multiplies, and the memory bandwidth was being expanded with more bandwidth and more energy efficiency at the same time. Compounding all of those effects led to super-acceleration of processing capabilities.”

SK hynix is a major HBM supplier for Nvidia, currently supplying fifth-generation HBM3E chips and aiming to deliver sixth-generation 12-layer HBM4 chips next year, and a 16-layer version by 2026.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]