Jensen Huang "Favorable situation for memory companies… 'HBM major buyer' NVIDIA isn't worried"

CES on-site briefing

All three memory companies expand production capacity

Demand continues to rise due to AI infrastructure investment

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA Chief Executive Officer (CEO), said of the memory semiconductor boom brought by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, "As AI factories grow rapidly, more memory semiconductor fabs will be needed," calling it "a very favorable situation for memory companies." He said that the 'AI special' for domestic memory semiconductor companies such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix is expected to continue for a considerable period.

Huang said at a press conference held on the 6th (local time) at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Las Vegas, USA, "AI will trigger a 'storage revolution.'" He said, "AI's use of a KV cache (key-value cache) is completely different from the existing information technology (IT) industry," and "Accordingly, demand for high-performance central processing units (CPUs) that manage storage is also exploding." A KV cache is a short-term memory that stores content AI has already read, described as a 'notebook that stores what AI has already read.' The CPU plays the role of placing and moving the KV cache.

Huang said, "CPUs will be used in many places, and it would not be surprising at all if we became the world's No. 1 CPU company." NVIDIA's CPU, 'Grace,' is accompanied by 16 low-power DRAM (LPDDR) chips. LPDDR serves to store the contextual and task information necessary for AI to continue conversations.

Regarding the increasingly deepening shortage of memory semiconductors, Huang said, "I'm not worried. Thanks to being a big buyer in the industry, we will enjoy a (relative) advantage." He explained, "NVIDIA uses the latest high-bandwidth memory (HBM), HBM4 (6th-generation product), exclusively," and "I think other companies will not use HBM4 for a considerable time." He added, "Because NVIDIA's purchase volume is so large, all memory manufacturers are expanding production capacity, and all are delivering results."

Huang emphasized that NVIDIA is one of the largest purchasers of memory semiconductors. He said, "NVIDIA purchases not only HBM but also graphics DRAM (GDDR) and LPDDR directly," and "We are a major buyer of GDDR." NVIDIA receives HBM, GDDR, and LPDDR from the three memory companies such as Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron. The latest graphics DRAM, GDDR7, goes into NVIDIA's gaming series GeForce RTX. Samsung Electronics is known as the largest supplier of GDDR7.

Las Vegas=Park Ui-myung reporter uimyung@hankyung.com