Two South Korean companies control 83% of the global memory chip market. Now they are racing each other to grab the top spot by tightening their ties to U.S. firms.
SK Hynix has held a long lead in the global high-bandwidth memory market with more advanced core technologies and an early foot in the door with Nvidia. These specialized memory chip interfaces allow artificial intelligence processors to access large amounts of data quickly, making them a crucial component of the powerful systems that train and run AI models.
Over the past year, Samsung has more than doubled its market share, stealing away SK Hynix’s business while forging new pacts with Nvidia and OpenAI.
For U.S. AI companies such as Nvidia and OpenAI, the rivalry matters because control over this critical component could affect how quickly and cheaply they can build the next generation of AI infrastructure.
“The question of technology leadership still matters, but now it is also assessed alongside capacity, because the entire memory industry faces constrained production capacity,” said Christopher Miller, associate professor of international history at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and author of the bestselling book Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.
“All the leading DRAM [dynamic random access memory] companies — SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron — are trying to use deals and long-term agreements with customers to make their HBM products more customized and shift from being a commodity business (as memory traditionally has been) to a more specialized product offering,” Miller told Rest of World .
SK Hynix is deepening ties with the U.S. AI industry, including a $4 billion advanced packaging facility in Indiana, where it broke ground in August. Samsung, too, has been slowly and steadily getting its foot in the American door.
Here’s a brief timeline of Samsung’s recent moves:
March 2025: Samsung collaborates with Nvidia to advance artificial intelligence-radio access network, or AI-RAN — a technology that embeds AI directly into cellular base stations and mobile network equipment.
Nvidia’s allocation decisions are still the predominant factor determining high-bandwidth memory market share.” Ben Reynolds, senior analyst, Rhodium Group
October 2025: Samsung comes onboard OpenAI’s Stargate project alongside SK Hynix to expand AI infrastructure.
Samsung and Nvidia plan an AI factory . It’s part of a Korea-wide initiative to deploy 260,000 Nvidia graphics processing units to Samsung, SK Hynix, Hyundai, Naver, and the Korean government. Samsung receives around 50,000.
June 2026: OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex are made available to all Samsung Electronics employees in Korea and all device-experience employees worldwide. The deployment is “one of our largest to date,” OpenAI says.
September 2026: OpenAI announces working with Samsung on next-generation chips.
“Nvidia’s allocation decisions are still the predominant factor determining HBM market share,” Ben Reynolds, senior analyst at independent research organization Rhodium Group, told Rest of World . “Samsung’s competitiveness with SK will depend, above all, on the extent to which it can poach share from SK as a supplier for Nvidia Vera Rubin. Building relationships with alternative AI chip suppliers like AMD and Broadcom provide a secondary opportunity to build share.”
Both SK Hynix and Samsung remain deeply exposed to China, where they have legacy plants and continue to test new chipmaking tools. The Washington-Beijing tussle is complicating matters — wooing the U.S. costs them business with China, and China is finding domestic replacements that will be hard to beat later.
Until 2025, chipmakers like SK Hynix, Samsung, and TSMC could ship export-controlled tools to their China fabrication plants without applying for a license, under a U.S. commerce policy called the Validated End User Program. The Donald Trump administration eliminated that program in 2025 and replaced it with an annual licensing process. Also, nearly every major Chinese semiconductor toolmaker is on a U.S. trade restriction list.
Meanwhile, in China, the companies face tough competition from fledgling domestic alternatives, Reynolds and Miller said.
“The Chinese market is a vital market, accounting for roughly one-third of the global market. However, the inherent risk is the potential loss of global market leadership,” Counterpoint’s Hwang said. “In the early stages of entering China, companies likely benefited significantly from subsidies and other incentives. However, as China’s domestic technology advances and given the lack of a viable exit strategy, strategies targeting China now present increasingly complex risks relative to the expected return.”
