Track Hyper | SK Hynix surpasses Samsung to top the DRAM market

Author: Zhou Yuan / Wall Street News

In the first quarter of 2025, the global DRAM market experienced the most significant shift since Samsung Electronics established its industry leadership in 1992.

According to statistics from market research firm Omdia, SK Hynix surpassed Samsung Electronics for the first time with a market share of 36.9% (Samsung's share being 34.4%), becoming the world's largest DRAM supplier.

Although global DRAM sales in the first quarter decreased by 9% quarter-on-quarter to USD 26.33 billion due to falling contract prices and a decline in HBM shipments, SK Hynix's revenue rose against the trend to USD 9.72 billion, while Samsung Electronics' revenue fell by 19% year-on-year to USD 9.1 billion.

This result not only ended Samsung's 33-year market monopoly but also marked a shift in industry competition logic driven by AI, reshaping storage technology iterations.

High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) became the core variable in this market shift.

SK Hynix established a significant advantage in the HBM3E field through long-term technological accumulation; the fifth-generation HBM3E products utilize 12-layer stacking technology, achieving a bandwidth of 1.2TB/s and a maximum single-chip capacity of 36GB, primarily supplying AI accelerator cards such as NVIDIA's H200 and B200.

With a first-mover advantage in TSV (Through-Silicon Via) packaging technology, SK Hynix has continuously invested in R&D since 2009, building a complete technological system from design to mass production and testing.

Currently, SK Hynix's HBM products occupy a major share of the global market, especially in the HBM3 segment, where it accounts for over 90%.

In contrast, Samsung's HBM3E technology has not passed NVIDIA's tests for a long time, leading to a sharp decline in shipments of high-priced products, which directly dragged down overall revenue performance.

In the traditional DRAM field, SK Hynix achieved an optimized balance of performance and cost through rapid mass production of 1b nm (1α-nanometer) process technology.

Hynix's 1b nm DDR5 products have improved energy efficiency by 20% compared to the previous generation, supporting market share expansion in the server and PC markets; Samsung has encountered bottlenecks in yield improvement for the 1a nm process, resulting in insufficient supply of high-end DDR5 products and being forced to shift some capacity to mature processes, further weakening market competitiveness.

The parameter scale of generative AI models is expanding exponentially, imposing stringent requirements on storage bandwidth and capacity.

For example, the NVIDIA H100 GPU requires 640GB of HBM3E and 2TB of DDR5 memory, while training models at the GPT-5 level requires EB-level storage support.

SK Hynix occupies over 70% of the AI server market through deep ties with NVIDIA, and its HBM3E products have been adopted by large-scale AI projects such as Microsoft's "Star Gate" and Google's Gemini.

HBM production highly relies on advanced packaging technology, with TSV and micro-bump (μBump) processes playing key roles.

SK Hynix has improved the stacking layers of HBM3E from 8 layers to 12 layers through its self-developed MR-MUF (Metal Diffusion Barrier Layer) technology, while also achieving good yield performance As its main packaging partner, TSMC has allocated 70% of its CoWoS capacity to SK Hynix, ensuring a stable supply of HBM3E.

Samsung has repeatedly delayed the mass production timeline of its 12-layer HBM3E products—the latest news indicates a postponement to the third quarter of 2025—thus losing the market advantage.

Moreover, the high-purity copper, epoxy resin, and other materials required for HBM production remain highly reliant on imports, with 60% of SK Hynix's TSV etching equipment sourced from Lam Research, and the Syndion series equipment capable of deep silicon etching to meet HBM packaging needs.

Currently, both SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics have initiated HBM4 research and development, with Hynix planning to launch samples in the second half of 2025. Its 16-layer stacked product will achieve a bandwidth of 2.56TB/s and a single capacity of 64GB, primarily targeting next-generation AI accelerators such as NVIDIA's H300 and AMD's MI400X.

Samsung is betting on hybrid bonding technology, attempting to achieve a technological leap in the HBM4E phase. However, due to compatibility issues with the co-production process of NAND and DRAM, its mass production progress remains uncertain.

In the traditional DRAM sector, SK Hynix plans to increase its 1b nm capacity to 90,000 wafers per month by the end of 2025 and has started R&D on 1c nm processes, aiming to increase transistor density by another 20%.

Samsung, on the other hand, is focusing on the application of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology, with an EUV introduction rate of 40% for its 1a nm process, but slow yield improvement is limiting the realization of scale effects.

With the popularity of AI PCs and large models at the edge, SK Hynix has launched the LPCAMM2 storage module designed specifically for AI computing, supporting a computing power demand of 40TOPS+, and is collaborating with manufacturers such as Lenovo and Dell to promote mass production.

Samsung is attempting to open new markets in embedded DRAM (eDRAM) through collaboration with AMD, but its eDRAM products for automotive and IoT applications still lag behind Micron Technology in performance metrics.

This shift marks a transition in the DRAM industry from scale competition to deep technological competition.

In Q1 2025, the combined market share of SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics, and Micron Technology in DRAM will exceed 95%+. Among them, SK Hynix holds over 60% of the HBM market share, forming a technological oligopoly; the price cycle shows structural differentiation: the average price of ordinary DRAM has dropped over 10%, but the price of HBM3E has only slightly decreased by 3% month-on-month, with AI-related storage products becoming a counter-cyclical support.

With the continued growth in demand for AI servers, TrendForce predicts that DRAM prices will stop falling and begin to rise in the second quarter of this year—market news has partially validated this speculation—wherein the price of HBM3E is expected to increase by 5%-10%, becoming the main driving force for industry recovery.

SK Hynix's ascendance over Samsung to the top of the DRAM market not only reflects the competition between the two companies' technological routes and market strategies but also serves as a concentrated manifestation of the paradigm shift in storage technology in the AI era.

As HBM and advanced processes continue to iterate, industry competition will shift from scale expansion to deep technology, with technological positioning capabilities and supply chain collaboration efficiency becoming key factors determining long-term competitiveness for enterprises For the entire semiconductor industry, this event marks that the AI-driven storage revolution has entered deep waters, where technological innovation and ecological reconstruction will jointly shape the industry landscape for the next decade