How Samsung Fell Behind in the AI Boom - and Lost $126 Billion in Market Value

After missing a chance to capitalize on the AI boom, "Samsung's profit has plunged," reports CNBC, and "around $126 billion has been wiped off its market value, according to data from S&P Capital IQ." 

It's gotten so bad that "an executive issued a rare public apology about the company's recent financial performance."

[A]s AI applications such as OpenAI's ChatGPT rose in popularity, the underlying infrastructure required to train the huge models they rely on became a bigger focus. Nvidia has emerged as the top player in this space with its graphics processing units (GPUs) that have become the gold standard used by tech giants for AI training. A crucial part of that semiconductor architecture is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. This next generation of memory involves stacking multiple dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips, but it had a small market before the AI boom. That's where Samsung got caught out and failed to invest... 

SK Hynix saw this opportunity. The company aggressively launched HBM chips which were approved for use in Nvidia architecture and, in the process, the South Korean firm established a close relationship with the U.S. giant. Nvidia's CEO even asked the company to speed up supply of its next generation chip, underscoring the importance of HBM to its products. SK Hynix posted record quarterly operating profit in the September quarter... 
Analysts said that Samsung is lagging behind competitors for a number of reasons, including underinvestment in HBM and the fact that it is not a first-mover. "It is fair to say that Samsung has not been able to close the gap with SK Hynix on the HBM development roadmap," said Kazunori Ito [director of equity research at Morningstar]. Samsung's ability to make a comeback in the short term appears to be closely linked to Nvidia. A company must pass a strict qualification process before Nvidia approves it as a HBM supplier — and Samsung has not yet completed this verification. But a green light from Nvidia could open the door for Samsung to return to growth and compete more effectively with SK Hynix, according to analysts.


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