Following confirmation that the “big three” memory makers—Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and Micron—have secured HBM4 supply approval for NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin, NVIDIA and SK hynix further deepened their collaboration. As highlighted by Global Economic News, SK hynix’s high-performance memory will also be used in NVIDIA’s next-generation data-center Vera CPU, marking an expansion of the partnership beyond HBM into CPU-level integration.
Notably, according to SK hynix’s press release on June 8, the company unveiled a multi-year next-generation memory partnership aligned with NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure roadmap.
Under the deal, SK hynix will supply memory solutions for NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin AI supercomputers, Vera CPUs, RTX Spark-powered PCs, and Jetson Thor robotics platforms, the company said. Bloomberg, citing CEO Jensen Huang during his South Korea visit, also reported on June 7 that NVIDIA’s next-generation Vera CPU will incorporate SK hynix DRAM.
As CPUs take on a larger role in the agent AI era, Bloomberg notes that the launch of Vera signals NVIDIA’s deeper push into the data-center CPU market, where it will compete with Intel’s Xeon, AMD’s EPYC line, as well as in-house chips from major cloud providers such as Amazon’s Graviton series.
According to NVIDIA, Vera incorporates a second-generation LPDDR5X memory subsystem, delivering significantly lower energy per bit than DDR5. It enables up to 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth—up to 2x that of traditional CPU designs—while operating at under 30W of memory power, compared with over 100W for DDR5-based systems.
It is worth noting that, according to ZDNet, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang reaffirmed that SK hynix has long been NVIDIA’s largest memory partner and will remain so going forward. SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won also said SK hynix is both NVIDIA’s largest memory supplier and that NVIDIA is its biggest customer, stressing that the company is “fully dedicated” to NVIDIA’s value chain, the report suggests.
However, Global Economic News notes that the agreement does not appear to give SK hynix exclusive supply status, as NVIDIA continues to rely on a multi-vendor sourcing strategy. Its next-generation platforms, including Vera CPUs and Rubin GPUs, are expected to integrate memory from SK hynix, Samsung Electronics, and Micron, the report adds.
Attention now shifts to Jensen Huang’s next stop in South Korea. According to the report, substantive discussions with Samsung are concentrated on Monday, with Huang expected to hold a separate meeting with Samsung Electronics DS Division head Vice Chairman Jun Young-hyun to coordinate memory supply issues.
Samsung Electronics has already passed NVIDIA’s next-generation HBM4 qualification test, securing approval for mass production supply. However, with SK hynix having an early lead from prior validation and initial allocation advantages, the key focus now is whether Samsung can expand its share through larger volume commitments and strengthen its position in the HBM supply chain, the report points out.
