Samsung makes about a third of the world’s DRAM—the memory inside virtually every phone, laptop, server, and data center on the planet. Together with its Korean rival SK Hynix, it controls roughly two-thirds of the global DRAM market and an even larger share of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the specialized chips that AI systems cannot run without. Samsung and SK Hynix are two of only three companies that make HBM at all; the third being American semiconductor company Micron.
When people talk about AI infrastructure, they tend to focus on Nvidia’s GPUs. But those GPUs are useless without the memory chips stacked alongside them, and Samsung’s three fabrication complexes in South Korea are among the most important pieces of the AI industrial boom. Samsung operates 12 fabrication lines, employs over 260,000 people worldwide, and is investing $73 billion in semiconductor capex and R&D this year alone, the largest single-year chip investment by any company in history.
