The chief executive of artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant Nvidia on Monday stressed the importance of its partnership with SK hynix to develop more advanced AI accelerators, saying “aggressive” development of advanced high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips is needed.

“The roadmap of high bandwidth memory is excellent, but frankly, we wish we got more bandwidth with lower energy,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said via video footage at an annual technology conference hosted by the SK Group, named SK AI Summit 2024 this year.

Huang called SK hynix’s HBM development plan “super aggressive” but “super necessary” at the same time, as AI is now evolving from a model that generates text into system models that retrieve a larger set of working data ranging from images to videos.

SK hynix was the first chipmaker in the world to supply fifth-generation HBM3E chips in March to Nvidia, who designs graphic processing units essential for AI computing.

The Korean company also initiated mass production of its advanced 12-layer HBM3E chips last month.

“Nvidia is a computing platform company … We don’t build the final computer,” Huang said, emphasizing the importance of its partnership with SK hynix and other partners.

Huang said his company has been practically “co-designing” AI accelerators with SK hynix, noting its innovation in HBM chips and custom memory chips helped its architectural work.

In the summit, OpenAI President and co-founder Greg Brockman also gave a keynote speech, saying Korea’s AI industry will be able to have a competitive edge thanks to the support from the government.

Korea has the experience of successfully penetrating broadband under a government initiative in the 1990s, Brockman noted, insisting the same can be done with AI.

In September, the country launched a presidential AI committee to establish development strategies for cutting-edge technologies in a bid to become one of top three global leaders in the industry. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang asked memory chip maker SK Hynix to bring forward the supply of its next-generation high-bandwidth memory chips (HBM) called HBM4 by six months, SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won said on Monday.

SK Hynix previously said it aimed to ship its HBM4 chips to customers in the second half of next year. (Yonhap)

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