By Kwanwoo Jun


Samsung Electronics shares rallied Wednesday after reports of artificial-intelligence chip giant Nvidia looking to buy next-generation chips from the South Korean company.

Shares of Samsung Electronics rose as much as 6.0% to 77,200 won ($57.72) in late Wednesday trade, on track for their sharpest daily gain in more than six months and outperforming the benchmark Kospi's 1.2% gain.

The rally followed multiple media reports of Nvidia co-founder and Chief Executive Jensen Huang telling a media briefing on Tuesday in San Jose, Calif., that his company is in the process of qualifying Samsung's new high bandwidth memory chips for Nvidia's graphics processing units in the future.

Samsung on Wednesday declined to comment on Huang's comments or a possible supply deal with Nvidia.

The HBM product is a high-performance DRAM chip type, which Nvidia and others adopt to use in powerful computing and AI applications.

The fast-growing HBM market, driven by the recent AI boom, is leading the global recovery in the semiconductor industry. The market is dominated by three companies--Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron Technology.

Samsung has recently struggled to catch up with its rivals as it appears to be lagging behind SK Hynix and Micron, which have both recently started mass-producing the new fifth-generation HBM3E product.

SK Hynix, a major Nvidia supplier, said Tuesday that it plans to supply HBM3E chips to clients from late March, likely ahead of its industry rivals.

Samsung, which aims to start mass production of the new AI chip in the first half, said in a statement released to a shareholders meeting in Seoul on Wednesday that it will continue to advance its 12-stack HBM technology and seek to regain leadership in the sector in the future.

Samsung also reaffirmed its planned KRW20 trillion investment in a memory-chip research center in South Korea this year, and expects around $100 million in revenue from its new advanced chip-packaging products.


Write to Kwanwoo Jun at kwanwoo.jun@wsj.com


(END) Dow Jones Newswires

03-20-24 0229ET