en.Wedoany.com Reported - Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron have all received approval from Nvidia to supply its fourth-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM4) product line.
According to Bloomberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed that all three companies have been certified to supply memory chips for its upcoming Vera Rubin platform. Huang added, "All three suppliers are in production and are competing to support Vera Rubin." At Computex Taipei, Huang revealed that Vera Rubin is fully in production, with the first shipments expected later this year.
Samsung began mass production of its HBM4 product line in February and announced this week that it has started shipping samples of its "enhanced" replacement product, the upcoming HBM4E. It is believed that Nvidia approved Samsung's HBM4 product line as early as January, requiring a data transfer rate threshold of 10 Gb/s. SK Hynix and Micron Technology have also met this threshold, although SK Hynix had to delay production of its HBM4 product line.
Memory shortages have raised concerns about the launch of Nvidia's next-generation product line. Previous reports indicated that shipment expectations for the Rubin series had dropped from 29% to 22% due to memory issues and apparent power consumption problems. The memory shortage has significantly impacted artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure construction, with the three major memory manufacturers extending delivery times to 2028. TSMC CEO C.C. Wei warned this week that demand for AI chips could outpace supply within a few years.
This concern has prompted Nvidia to act swiftly. Huang once secured Nvidia's initial memory hardware supply through his famous "chimaek summit" (drinking beer at a fried chicken restaurant with two Asian heavyweights), a move reflecting his supply chain assurance strategy. Nvidia has recently leaned towards investing in suppliers to expand their manufacturing capabilities, particularly in optical suppliers, as it prepares for the highly anticipated co-packaged optics (CPO) iteration in its networking product portfolio. Ayar Labs, Lumentum, Corning, and Coherent have all received support from the chip giant, while Marvell was hailed by Huang as "the next trillion-dollar company" during a keynote speech at Computex.
At a press conference during GTC (which SDxCentral attended), Huang explained his proactive supply chain management approach. He said, "I am constantly reviewing the entire technology lifecycle and the manufacturing aspects of the entire supply chain" to "prepare our company for growth." "When you look upstream, you conclude that we are scaling up," Huang said. "We are beginning to scale up silicon photonics technology through Spectrum-6 and plan to add it to our expansion technologies via NVLink in the coming years, meaning the silicon photonics capacity we need will be significantly higher than current global capacity." He continued, "Therefore, we work with the supply chain to ensure we can help them build capacity in advance. Sometimes we give them prepayments, sometimes just forecasts. If technology capacity is insufficient but demand is huge, we may decide to invest in the company and provide all other support."
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