Samsung Vice Chairman meets with NVIDIA CEO in the US: its 8-Hi HBM3E could finally be ready

Samsung Vice Chairman Jeon Young-hyun has reportedly met with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on US soil to discuss supplying the company with its new 8-Hi HBM3E memory for use on its AI GPUs.

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In a new report from SEDaily, we're learning from semiconductor industry sources that the vice chairman recently visited NVIDIA's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California with CEO Jensen Huang to discuss various agendas surrounding the cooperation between the two companies.

Jeon Young-hyun is the Vice President and Head of Device Solutions (DS) Division, overseeing the semiconductor division of Samsung, met with Jensen in person, which leads the industry to believe Samsung's new 8-Hi HBM3E memory is finally, finally ready for certification (after months and months of delays and issues).

An industry insider told SEDaily: "The reason Vice Chairman Jeon visited the U.S. and met with CEO Hwang was to discuss the recent status of improvements to HBM3E 8-layer products, as well as the positive signals from the 'quality certification' related to this". Samsung Electronics responded, saying:"We cannot confirm any matters related to customers".

• Read more: Samsung HBM4 mass production in 2H 2025, 'optimized version' of HBM3E
• Read more: Samsung has approval to supply NVIDIA with HBM3E in AI GPUs for China
• Read more: NVIDIA CEO says he can't trust Samsung's HBM products or engineers, won't do business with them

Samsung was expecting to have its HBM3E memory quality certification achieved by 2H 2024, but it missed that by a long shot and let fellow South Korean memory rival SK hynix, take most of NVIDIA's requests for HBM3E, as the HBM3E memory certification for Samsung was delayed until early 2025.

Samsung Electronics knows that it has been falling behind with HBM3E, and has been hard at work improving and tweaking its design. In a conference call in late-January 2025, a Samsung official said: "We are preparing improved HBM3E products as planned" and that the company plans to mass produce "improved products for some customers starting from the end of the first quarter, but the visible increase in supply of improved products will begin in earnest starting in the second quarter".