Memory Chips

Samsung Electronics is the improbable triumph of a company that began in 1938 as a trading house selling dried fish, noodles, and produce — and whose founder, Lee Byung-chul, pivoted into electronics in 1969, decades after the chaebol's grocery origins. The bet was staggering: in the 1970s, Samsung started making black-and-white TVs in a country most of the world considered a poor backwater. Fifty years later, it is the world's largest maker of smartphones, memory chips, and TVs. The empire's core is semiconductors: Samsung is the world's largest memory chip maker (DRAM and NAND), with a near-duopoly over advanced memory alongside SK Hynix, and its foundry business makes chips for other companies. Its mobile division's Galaxy line competes head-to-head with Apple for the global smartphone crown, and its consumer electronics division dominates TVs and home appliances. The company also runs one of the world's largest smartphone factories and the largest semiconductor fabs, in Pyeongtaek. Headquartered in Suwon, South Korea, with about 270,000 employees and annual revenue near US$200 billion, Samsung Electronics is the flagship of the Samsung Group, which generates about a fifth of South Korea's GDP. Its challenges — memory price cycles, catching TSMC in leading-edge foundry, and Chinese competition — are the challenges of Korea itself, but its dominance in memory remains the bedrock of the digital world.

When the AI boom suddenly needed memory chips that could feed data to GPUs faster than ever, one company was ready: SK Hynix. The South Korean firm began in 1983 as Hyundai Electronics, changed hands to the SK Group in 2012, and is now the world's #2 memory chip maker — and the dominant supplier of HBM (high bandwidth memory), the advanced chips stacked inside Nvidia's AI accelerators. The HBM story explains the company's leap: each HBM module stacks up to a dozen DRAM dies with through-silicon vias, an extraordinarily hard manufacturing feat that only SK Hynix and a handful of rivals can do at volume. Its HBM3E products are the performance bottleneck-breakers for AI training, and the company has sold out its HBM capacity years in advance. Based in Icheon with about 31,000 employees, SK Hynix also produces mainstream DRAM, NAND flash, and SSD products, with annual revenue around ₩33 trillion. Its U.S. investment — a $3.9 billion advanced packaging plant in Indiana — reflects a new strategy: putting its most valuable manufacturing close to its most important customers.