Lisa Su has been at the head of AMD since 2014. Captaining such an important ship, it is assumed that on some occasion he will have visited one of its main component suppliers. But it turns out that, in his role as CEO, he had never traveled to South Korea, home to one of the world’s leading foundries. The journey has paid off and AMD returns with next-generation memory. But the one who is happiest is the one who is going to allow AMD and NVIDIA to create their new platforms for AI.
Samsung.
Visiting. In Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul, is one of Samsung’s main factories. The South Korean company is expanding and has the goal of becoming one of the names in the American industry while maintaining its local muscle, and the plant inaugurated a few years ago is an example.
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As it could not be otherwise in these times, the facility is focused on the creation of memory chips to power the AI hardware. SK Hynix and Micron are Samsung’s two big competitors in this field and they are also opening and buying plants to increase their memory production. And AMD wants a piece of that pie because Samsung is, right now, the main supplier of next-generation memory.
The agreement. The trip, apart from seeing the facilities, was the perfect setting to make the announcement that Samsung will become AMD’s main supplier of HBM4 memory. Specifically, the Instinct MI455X GPU, the next generation of the American company.
Because when we talk about GPUs for AI, we talk more about NVIDIA (which has also just presented new features) because they are pulling with everything (and in all sectors), but AMD is the other big one that does not want to be left out of the conversation. They are reaching billion-dollar agreements with companies like Meta, they have stratospheric growth forecasts and, although far from NVIDIA, they want to be in the position of providing the hardware for AI.
Happy managers | Photo: Samsung
HBM4. That Samsung is the one that supplies the HBM4 memory to AMD is great news for them because they are the ones that, at least for the moment, have the most refined manufacturing process for this type of memory. In the past they had already supplied the HBM3E for AMD’s current MI350X and MI355 accelerators, but the new agreement implies that they will access the same type of memory that Samsung itself supplies exclusively – for now – to NVIDIA.
Memory is not everything, obviously, but it plays a fundamental role. The higher and faster bandwidth, the more data per second it can handle. Think of this memory as a very wide and perfectly paved highway. And Samsung was the only one that had managed to pass NVIDIA’s demanding tests for its new Vera Rubin architecture.
Samsung a tope. And in this agreement it is evident that both parties win, but Samsung is achieving extreme recognition in recent months. Achieving the agreement first with NVIDIA and now with AMD means that they separate themselves from their main rival, the also South Korean SK Hynix, which is somewhat further behind with the development of its HBM4 chips. But in addition, AMD’s statement indicates that Samsung will also supply DDR5 memory to AMD’s EPYC servers and the possibility of them manufacturing some of AMD’s future chips has been discussed.
Because Samsung manufactures memory, yes, but also other processors. There they have their own Exynos for the Galaxy S26, but in the past they manufactured the most powerful Qualcomm Snapdragons and it has been proposed again that the South Korean company manufactures 2 nanometer Qualcomm chips. On the other hand, they have already won a contract worth more than 16 billion with Tesla to create chips focused on AI.
It is clear that TSMC is the main foundry in the world, but Samsung is determined to be one of the main hammers with which to build the future of AI. And, speaking of the king of Rome, the agreement means that Samsung manages to take over TSMC and AMD achieves a second role to reduce its dependence on the Taiwanese company. Because there we already know that there is a best friend, and it is undoubtedly NVIDIA.
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