Why Samsung Is Falling Behind in the AI Race
Famous for mobile phones and flatscreens, the electronics company is struggling when it comes to its most important product.
Illustration: Vanessa Chandrasekaran
Though famous for mobile phones and flatscreen televisions, what consumers probably don’t know about Samsung Electronics is that its biggest product is a memory chip—one that’s become critical to the frenetic race for advanced artificial intelligence. And in that race, Samsung is falling behind.
For decades, the South Korean giant was the world’s leading maker of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), a chip component that’s in many of the electronics you own. Meanwhile, SK Hynix—also based in South Korea—teamed up with US-based Advanced Micro Devices to develop a more advanced version that, at the time, was a niche product suited primarily for video game hardware. But then AI came along, and everything changed. Those High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chips suddenly became the hottest commodity, and Samsung was caught napping. In this Bloomberg Originals mini-documentary, we explain the scope of Samsung’s challenges and what its success or failure in the HBM market may mean for South Korea as a whole.