AMD and Samsung Electronics sign a Memorandum of Understanding on AI memory and look into foundry collaboration

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) said on Wednesday that they had signed a memorandum of understanding to deepen their strategic collaboration on memory chip supplies for AI infrastructure.

According to a release, the collaboration will concentrate on providing optimized DDR5 memory for AMD’s sixth-generation EPYC CPUs and Samsung’s next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM4) for AMD’s forthcoming Instinct MI455X AI accelerators.

Additionally, the businesses will talk about potential foundry partnerships in which Samsung may supply chip manufacturing services under contract for AMD products of the future.

Samsung will position itself as a major HBM4 supplier for AMD’s upcoming AI GPUs under the terms of the deal. The South Korean company has already been AMD’s main provider of HBM, providing the MI350X and MI355X accelerators with HBM3E chips.

The deal was made during the week of Nvidia’s annual developer conference, GTC, when CEO Jensen Huang complimented the Korean company’s HBM4 chips and announced a foundry alliance on Monday.
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As the need for AI grows and makes HBM chips harder to get, the alliance highlights how chipmakers around the world are racing to secure long-term deals for advanced memory.

AMD announced last month that it has reached an agreement to sell Meta Platforms up to $60 billion worth of AI chips over a five-year period, with the Facebook owner being able to buy up to 10% of the chips. Last year, AMD and OpenAI inked a similar agreement.

The largest memory chip manufacturer in the world, Samsung, has been working to close the gap with competitors in the rapidly expanding HBM market. According to Counterpoint, it has roughly a 22% portion of the global HBM market, while market leader SK Hynix has a 57% share.