Report: Samsung to Use TSMC Process for Nvidia's Next-Gen HBM Base Dies

According to a report by the Seoul Economic Daily, Samsung Electronics plans to use Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)'s 3-nanometer process to produce the base dies for Nvidia's next-generation custom High Bandwidth Memory (NVHBM). Previously, Samsung manufactured both the core dies and base dies for all its HBM products in-house. This shift indicates that Samsung is abandoning its long-standing one-stop, fully integrated manufacturing model for HBM to accept technical requirements set by Nvidia.

The report states that Nvidia has requested its three NVHBM suppliers—Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron—to use TSMC's 3nm process for the base dies and to uniformly adopt the sixth-generation DRAM process, codenamed 1c, for the core dies. NVHBM is based on the seventh-generation HBM4E architecture and was announced by Nvidia in August. Nvidia's move aims to standardize performance across different suppliers, as varying manufacturing solutions have made it difficult to achieve consistent results with a single design, while also reducing the workload of product validation for each supplier individually.

Samsung's Device Solutions division, responsible for its foundry business, reportedly accepted these requirements after internal evaluation. However, for standard HBM products destined for other clients like AMD, Samsung plans to continue maintaining its vertically integrated production strategy. Additionally, Samsung retains the possibility of developing and producing NVHBM base dies in its own fabs as a contingency plan against potential TSMC capacity constraints. The news has not yet been officially confirmed by either Samsung or Nvidia.