“Samsung Returns to the Top” Hail Its Chip Clients
For decades, Samsung held the position of the world’s largest manufacturer of memory chips. However, recently the company fell behind its competitors in the highly profitable high bandwidth memory (HBM) chip segment. Over the past couple of years, this gap became more noticeable. Samsung’s recent advancements have been widely recognized, earning it praise from major semiconductor chip customers.
AI Companies Praise Samsung’s HBM4 Chips
At the 2026 New Year’s Address, Dr. Young Hyun Jun, head of Samsung’s semiconductor chip division revealed that the company’s latest sixth generation HBM4 chips have achieved noticeable competitive advantages. According to him, these chips have proven to be highly competitive and have been praised by customers. His statement “Samsung is back” clearly indicated that the company has regained its position and is no longer trailing rivals in the HBM sector.
Dr. Young Hyun Jun also stated that Samsung is the only company globally capable of providing a complete “one-stop solution” in the semiconductor chip industry. This means Samsung can manage everything from designing logic chips and producing memory chips to manufacturing semiconductors and providing advanced chip packaging services, all under one roof.
This claim is accurate because TSMC focuses mainly on manufacturing chips and does not design them. In contrast, companies such as Micron and SK Hynix specialize primarily in memory chips rather than logic chip manufacturing or foundry services. Samsung stands apart because it designs and manufactures its own chips and also produces chips for other fabless semiconductor companies.
Why the Market for AI Chips Is Growing Faster Than Ever
In the last few years, the growing use of AI chatbots and systems based on large language models (LLMs) has caused a huge rise in demand for semiconductor chips. Many industries now need more chips to support these AI technologies.
Memory chips like DRAM and HBM are in short supply worldwide mainly due to heavy purchases by leading AI companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI. These companies require large numbers of chips to train their AI algorithms and deliver AI services to clients. Samsung has said that it plans to respond to this extraordinary demand for AI chips, producing more to help power AI applications and to position itself as a leader in the AI era.
The company also stated that its foundry division, Samsung Foundry is now experiencing strong growth. A foundry is a service in which a company manufactures chips on behalf of other firms that do not have their own chip making factories. Essentially, Samsung produces the chips while these other companies focus on designing them.
Samsung plans to deliver HBM4 and SOCAMM2 chips to Nvidia, the world’s leading AI company. Reports also indicate that Samsung will provide HBM4 chips to Google to support the development of its next-generation TPU accelerators which are designed to improve AI processing.
Samsung has also secured contracts to manufacture camera sensors for Apple as well as AI5 and AI6 processors for Tesla. Reports suggest that other major chip companies including AMD and Qualcomm are considering outsourcing some of their chip production to Samsung.
