Samsung Electronics has launched, for the first time in the world, mass-production shipments of sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM4), which will shape the landscape of the artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor industry. Having fallen behind SK hynix in the previous-generation HBM race, Samsung is moving to preempt the HBM4 supply market with its first HBM4 mass-production shipments.

On the 12th, Samsung Electronics announced it had begun mass-production shipments of HBM4 with industry-leading performance. The schedule, initially planned for the third week of February after the Lunar New Year holiday, was moved up by about one week.

The HBM4 shipped for mass production applies the industry-leading 1c DRAM (sixth-generation 10-nanometer class) and a foundry 4-nanometer process to the base die that serves as the brain of HBM, securing stable yield and performance without redesign. Samsung Electronics explained that this both advances performance and power efficiency and achieves stable yields from the outset of mass production.

In particular, HBM4’s data-processing speed is 11.7Gbps, about 46% faster than the international semiconductor standards body (JEDEC) benchmark of 8Gps (gigabits per second), and can reach up to 13Gbps. Samsung Electronics said it is expected to effectively alleviate data bottlenecks that intensify as AI model sizes grow.

For total memory bandwidth per single stack, the product reaches up to 3.3TB/s (terabytes per second), about 2.7 times higher than the fifth-generation product (HBM3E). Capacity reaches 24GB~36GB through 12-layer stacking technology. According to Hwang Sang-joon, vice president in charge of memory development at Samsung Electronics, process competitiveness and design improvements have secured ample headroom for performance scaling, enabling the company to meet customer requirements in a timely manner.

This HBM4 also employs design technologies that enhance energy efficiency to address power consumption and heat-generation issues that arise during data-center operation.

Buoyed by the world-first mass-production shipments of HBM4, Samsung Electronics expects this year’s HBM sales to more than triple from a year earlier. The company noted that it is the only company in the world able to provide a ‘one-stop solution’ spanning logic, memory, foundry, and packaging, and that it has the production capacity to respond flexibly in the short term even if HBM demand expands.

Samsung Electronics plans to roll out next-generation HBM products sequentially from the second half of this year. It plans to sample HBM4E in the second half of 2026 and to begin sequential sampling of custom HBM from 2027 tailored to each customer’s requirements.