Samsung shares have soared 6.44% this Thursday, reaching a price of 179,600 South Korean won, a new all-time high, after announcing on Thursday the start of mass production of next-generation HBM4 memory chips to boost artificial intelligence (AI). Since the beginning of the year, the shares have risen nearly 50%, and have more than tripled their value in the last 52 weeks. Its capitalization is around 1,195 trillion won (more than 717 billion euros).
Samsung, which has defined itself, has explained that high-bandwidth HBM4 chips are considered a key component to expand the huge data centers driving the AI explosion.
can become one of the main buyers of Samsung equipment, which has added that it has begun sending the first commercial orders to customers. The South Korean group recently obtained certification from Nvidia for the latest version of its HBM4 memory chip.
Samsung, the world’s leading memory chip maker, had lagged in its response in the advanced AI chip market, compared to other competitors in supplying previous generation HBM chips. The South Korean giant has noted that its HBM4 offers a constant processing speed of 11.7 gigabits per second (Gbps), a 22% increase over its predecessor, the HBM3E. Samsung said its latest chips can reach a maximum speed of 13Gbps, helping to minimize growing data bottlenecks.
In this regard, Samsung expects its HBM sales to more than triple in 2026 compared to 2025 and is proactively expanding its HBM4 production capacity. “Following the successful launch of HBM4 to the market, sampling of HBM4E is expected to begin in the second half of 2026, while customized HBM samples will begin to reach customers in 2027, according to their respective specifications,” the company said in a statement.
Broadly speaking, the global rush to build AI data centers has driven demand for HBM, a type of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), which helps process massive amounts of data generated by complex AI applications.
SK Hynix and Micron, Samsung’s competitors in this area, have also started mass production of these chips. SK Hynix stated that it aims to maintain its market share in next-generation HBM4 chips, while Micron confirmed that it had already entered large-scale production of HBM4 with the start of shipments to its customers.
In this scenario, both companies have also registered strong increases in the stock market. Micron shares soared almost 10% yesterday, encouraged by the improvement in the target price by Morgan Stanley, and are already up 336% in the last year. Its market capitalization exceeds $461 billion.
These analysts believe that the company can benefit from the increase in memory chip prices, resulting from customer demand for new data centers dedicated to AI.
