Fearing increased US sanctions, Chinese companies rushed to purchase HBM memory from Samsung

According to rumors, US authorities intend to take the next step to limit the access of Chinese developers of artificial intelligence systems to computing accelerators and components for their creation. Memory chips of the HBM family may be prohibited from being sent to China, and therefore local Samsung customers actively purchased them in the last half of the year.

Image Source: Samsung Electronics

This was reported by Reuters, citing its own sources, which claims that Huawei, Baidu and numerous Chinese startups have sharply increased purchases of HBM family memory from Samsung for their own needs since the beginning of this year. Based on the results of the first half of the year, the Chinese supply direction formed about 30% of Samsung’s revenue from HBM supplies. Last week it was reported that US authorities would propose new export control rules this month that would ban certain types of HBM memory from being shipped to China.

Considering that only three companies are engaged in the production of HBM worldwide – SK hynix, Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology, limiting its supplies to China will be quite simple, since the first two have headquarters in South Korea, loyal to the United States, and the third and is completely American. Apparently, Chinese accelerator manufacturers are not yet able to integrate the advanced HBM3 or HBM3E into their hardware solutions, and therefore the bulk of supplies falls on HBM2E. This memory is used in its accelerators by Huawei, which is one of the flagships of the Chinese semiconductor industry. In addition, such microcircuits can be used in the production of satellite equipment.

It was previously reported that the Chinese CXMT is trying to independently produce HBM2, but the corresponding activity has already come to the attention of the American authorities, who are preparing appropriate targeted sanctions against this company. Samsung, in terms of HBM supplies to China, will suffer the most from possible American export restrictions, since Micron does not supply its memory of this type to China, and SK hynix prefers to focus on generations of memory that are more profitable to sell.