SK hynix president says AI memory market to grow at average annual rate of 30% through 2030

SK hynix president says the HBM memory market will grow at 30% per year through to 2030, with leading AI GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD using the best HBM they can get, and the AI market isn't slowing down any time soon.

2

The upbeat projection for global growth of HBM used in AI chips brushes off any concerns in rising price pressures in a sector that, for decades, has been treated like commodities such as oil or coal, reports Reuters. US cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI servers, which is very healthy for one of the key ingredients: HBM.

SK hynix's Choi Joon-yong, the head of HBM business planning at SK hynix, said: "AI demand from the end user is pretty much, very firm and strong".

HBM4 is right around the corner, with the next-gen HBM memory standard debuting inside of NVIDIA's next-generation Rubin R100 AI GPU. HBM4 is more complicated to make than HBM3 + HBM3E inside of AI GPUs of today, with HBM4 makers including SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron all having to change the way they build their respective HBM4 memory.

This means that it's no longer possible to just easily replace a rival's HBM with a nearly identical chip or product, as their new HBM4 includes a customer-specific logic die, or "base die", that helps manage the HBM.

Choi continued, saying that companies like NVIDIA and AMD will want specific performance or power characteristics with their HBM4 memory, saying "each customer has different taste". This is part of SK hynix's future in HBM market growth, as customers will want customizations made that SK hynix isn't even doing right now.

SK hynix recently "drastically" raised pricing on HBM4 memory as it is more complicated to make, and it's in a "war of nerves" against NVIDIA, more on that story above. The company also beat Samsung -- its fellow market rival in South Korea -- as the world's biggest memory chip supplier for the first time ever, and that pace isn't slowing down with HBM4.