AMD CEO Lisa Su Meets Samsung Co-CEO to Discuss Strategic Semiconductor Partnerships
AMD CEO Lisa Su met with Samsung Electronics co-CEO Jun Young-hyun in Seoul for over three hours to discuss expanding strategic partnerships across memory supply and foundry services. This follows a memorandum of understanding signed earlier in the year targeting sixth-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM4) and server DDR5 memory. Securing a stable supply of next-generation HBM4 memory is critical for AMD to effectively compete with NVIDIA in the AI accelerator market. Additionally, expanding foundry cooperation with Samsung provides AMD with strategic manufacturing flexibility beyond its primary foundry partner, TSMC. While Su noted that the two companies maintain a broad partnership spanning areas like physical AI, no concrete commercial deals or specific manufacturing orders were finalized during the visit. Industry analysts indicate Samsung seeks foundry orders from AMD, while AMD aims to guarantee sufficient HBM production capacity.
## BACKGROUND
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a specialized 3D-stacked DRAM architecture that offers exceptionally wide memory interface bandwidth needed for complex AI workloads. Because advanced AI processors require far greater data transfer rates than traditional server DDR memory, chipmakers are aggressively competing for early access to next-generation HBM architectures.