‘Samsung is back,’ hail the company’s chip clients

For decades, Samsung was the world's biggest memory chip maker. However, it lagged behind in the lucrative high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chip market for the past couple of years. The South Korean firm has now made a remarkable comeback and even received top praise from its semiconductor chip clients.

In its ‘2026 New Year's Address,' the head of Samsung's semiconductor chip division (DS or Device Solutions), Dr. Young Hyun Jun, revealed that the company's sixth-generation HBM chips (HBM4) have demonstrated distinct competitiveness, earning praise from its chip customers. They also said, “Samsung is back,” signaling that the company is no longer lagging behind its rivals in the HBM segment.

Dr. Young Hyun Jun also said that Samsung is the only company in the world that can offer a “one-stop solution” in the semiconductor chip business, offering chip manufacturing, logic chip design, memory chips, and advanced chip packaging under one roof.

This is true, as TSMC manufactures chips but doesn't design them, while Micron and SK Hynix design memory chips but don't manufacture them in-house. Samsung designs and manufactures its own chips and it manufactures chips for other fabless firms.

Over the past few years, since the rise of large language model (LLM)-based AI chatbots and algorithms, there has been an unprecedented demand for semiconductor chips.

In particular, the world is facing a shortage of memory chips (like DRAM and HBM), as AI giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, have been buying a bulk of those chips to train their AI algorithms and offer AI services to clients. Samsung says it will respond to the unprecedented demand for AI chips (chips used in AI processing) to lead the AI era.

It also said that its foundry business (Samsung Foundry) has entered a phase of significant growth. Foundry is referred to as contract chip manufacturing for firms that don't have their own chip fabrication capabilities.

The company will supply HBM4 and SOCAMM2 chips to Nvidia, which is the world's biggest AI company. It is reported that it will also provide HBM4 chips to Google for next-generation TPU accelerators.

It has also bagged contracts to make camera sensors for Apple and AI5 and AI6 processors for Tesla. Reports suggest that AMD and Qualcomm are considering getting some of their chips manufactured by Samsung.