Samsung soars more than 5% after report of Nvidia considering its next-gen chips

Shares of South Korean heavyweight Samsung Electronics soared more than 5% Wednesday after reports of interest from chip giant Nvidia.

Earlier on Wednesday, media reports emerged that Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang hinted during a media briefing that his firm is in the process of qualifying Samsung Electronics’ new-generation high-bandwidth memory chips for its graphics processing units.

“HBM memory is very complicated and the value added is very high. We are spending a lot of money on HBM,” Huang said, in comments carried by the Korea Economic Daily. He reportedly added that Nvidia is in the process of testing Samsung Electronics’ HBM chips.

“Samsung is very good, a very good company,” Huang signaled.

The qualification process will likely involve checks to see whether the chips meet Nvidia’s specific requirements. It does not oblige the company to purchase Samsung’s supply.

This comes after rival SK Hynix announced that it was set to deliver its high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips to customers, with Reuters saying that Nvidia would be its first client.

Shares of SK Hynix plunged as much as 3.56% on Wednesday.

Samsung’s daily gain Wednesday was the largest percentage jump the stock has seen since September, according to Reuters data.

During the annual general shareholders’ meeting of Wednesday, Samsung Electronics co-CEO Kye-Hyun Kyung said the company expects to log $100 million or more of revenue from its next batch of advanced chip-packaging products in 2024, according to Reuters. The firm set up the advanced chip packaging unit last year.