Chinese companies have been buying Samsung's high-performance HBM chips en masse for several months.

Chinese tech giants such as Baidu and Huawei have been actively buying high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips from Samsung since the beginning of this year and here's why...

Here's What We Know

This is due to concerns over possible new US restrictions on semiconductor chip exports to China. A Reuters report says that Chinese firms account for nearly 30 per cent of Samsung's global HBM chip sales.

The US has already imposed restrictions on exports of more advanced chips (5nm and smaller) and plans to impose additional measures that could affect HBM chips critical for artificial intelligence processing. As a result, Chinese companies including Haawking and Tencent have increased purchases of HBM2E chips, which are two generations older than the most advanced HBM3E.

If the US imposes further restrictions, Samsung could face serious business problems. Meanwhile, China's CXMT is developing its own HBM2 chips, but they are three generations behind global leaders such as Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix, which are already working on HBM4.

Source: Reuters