Samsung managed to agree on the supply of HBM3E for NVIDIA, but only in an 8-tier performance

Being the largest memory supplier in general, Samsung Electronics has not yet taken an active participation in the supply of NVIDIA with HBM3E type accelerators. With the submission of Bloomberg today it became known that in December the 8-tier HBM3E memory was certified by NVIDIA, but the latter will be used only in accelerators for the Chinese market.

Image Source: Samsung Electronics

We add that an advanced one among the massively supplied products is now considered a 12-tier memory of HBM3E, it is formally offered by all three market participants: SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung. The latter, however, has long been able to certify its 12-tier HBM3E for use in NVIDIA accelerators, although it still has no hope of doing this. The competing SK Hynix already supplies NVIDIA with advanced 12-tier HBM3E chips of its own production. Both Korean memory manufacturers hope to establish mass supplies of HBM4 chips in the second half of this year, and later get NVIDIA orders for this type of product.

The limitations of the Samsung HBM3E use scope by NVIDIA suggests that this supplier still cannot fully satisfy the requests of the American accelerator developer for artificial intelligence systems. Apparently, NVIDIA cannot yet use the HBM3E memory of this Korean brand in its advanced accelerators of the Blackwell generation, and will be limited to the use of the Hopper family as part of accelerators, which can so far be delivered to China with some reservations. If the US sanctions in this direction are strengthened, then Samsung will temporarily lose the opportunity to cooperate with NVIDIA.