Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix Increase Research and Development Spending to Secure Global Dominance in Artificial Intelligence High Bandwidth Memory Technology
As the race for artificial intelligence memory domination is heating up, both Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have shown tremendous growth in their research and development expenditure.
According to quarterly financial statements analyzed by the Elec, Samsung Electronics spent 11,337,400,000,000 KRW on research in the 1st quarter, which is a 25.5% year over year increase from 9,032,700,000,000 KRW in the same period of the prior year. SK Hynix also saw impressive growth of 68.3% with its research spending totaling 2,550,500,000,000 KRW.
Some of the research output for the first quarter at Samsung includes mass production shipping for the HBM4 that uses the 10nm class, 6th generation 1c DRAM process. For the base die used in the 6th generation high bandwidth memory, Samsung manufactured using 4nm foundry process in order to optimize power and signal.
Samsung Electronics is currently proceeding with the development of HBM4E and expects to provide the initial samples in the 2nd quarter. In other areas of electronics, Samsung also completed the development of PM1763, a server solid state drive that supports PCIe 6.0, along with Exynos 5410 and Exynos 1680 mobile processors in the first quarter.
For the first quarter, Samsung’s total facility investment was 11,233,200,000,000 KRW, with 90.7% of this budget being invested in the device solutions division. This year, the company has plans to spend more than 110,000,000,000,000 KRW combined on research and facilities, hoping to secure new technology for artificial intelligence and robotics semiconductors.
At the 57th shareholder meeting held recently, the aggressive financial forecast of the company was announced by Vice Chairman Jun Young hyun.
“We plan a significant increase in facility investment this year compared to last year. We will further strengthen investment in leading research and development such as next generation processes and element technologies for the purpose of securing technical dominance.”
SK Hynix allocated 4.9% of its 52,576,300,000,000 KRW quarterly revenue to research and development. The first quarter marked the second straight quarter in which the company's research spending surpassed 2,000,000,000,000 KRW, compared to an average quarterly investment of 1,110,000,000,000 KRW from 2022 to 2024.
In terms of the expenditure breakdown, personnel costs consumed the most at 1,357,100,000,000 KRW. In relation to HBM4E, SK Hynix is working on optimizing the 1c nano process for the core dies with customer samples to be supplied in the second half and mass production to begin next year.
For the first quarter, SK Hynix facility investment was increased by 21.9% to 7,347,800,000,000 KRW. Out of this figure, the majority of the budget, totaling 6,024,900,000,000 KRW, was dedicated to building the new semiconductor manufacturing plants, with the remainder spent on acquiring specialized machinery and land.
The fiscal expansion seems to coincide with the increasing demand for high bandwidth memory and other components needed for modern artificial intelligence workloads.
