A man walks past a logo of SK Hynix at the lobby of the company's Bundang office in Seongnam on January 29, 2021.
South Korean memory chipmaker SK Hynix said Friday that it was ready to mass produce its next-generation high-bandwidth memory chips, staying ahead of rivals, and sending the company's stock soaring.
HBM is a type of memory that is used in chipsets for artificial-intelligence computing, including in chips from global AI giant Nvidia — a major client of SK Hynix.
SK Hynix said earlier this year that it had shipped samples of its HBM4 chips to customers, as it sought to beat competitors including Samsung Electronics and Micron Technologies .
According to its announcement Friday, the company has finished its internal validation and quality assurance process for HBM4 and is ready to manufacture those at scale.
"Completion of HBM4 development will be a new milestone for the industry," said Joohwan Cho, head of HBM development at SK Hynix.
HBM4 is the sixth generation of HBM technology — a type of Dynamic Random Access Memory, or DRAM. DRAM can be found in personal computers, workstations and servers and is used to store data and program code.
SK Hynix's latest HBM4 product has doubled bandwidth and increased power efficiency by 40% compared to the previous generation, according to the company.
Notably, HBM4 is expected to be the main AI memory chip needed for Nvidia's next-generation Rubin architecture — a more powerful AI chip for global data centers — said Dan Nystedt, vice-president at TriOrient, an Asia-based private investment firm with a focus on semiconductors.
"SK Hynix is a key supplier for Nvidia, and the announcement shows it remains far ahead of rivals," he said.
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