AMD Reportedly Eyes Samsung Taylor 2 HBM Capacity

According to industry reports, Samsung Electronics' foundry business is expected to secure a major order from AMD, with the two companies planning to collaborate on the mass production of base dies for next-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).

People familiar with the matter indicate that AMD may have committed to using nearly all of the initial production capacity at Samsung's second Taylor fab (Taylor 2) in Texas, United States. This could leave very limited capacity available for other customers during the facility's initial production phase. Samsung previously secured an automotive chip manufacturing agreement with Tesla for its first Taylor fab.

Under the proposed arrangement, Samsung will manufacture logic base dies for HBM at its Texas facility. These dies will then be bonded with DRAM produced at Samsung's memory fabrication facilities in South Korea to form complete HBM products.

The Taylor 2 facility reportedly covers approximately 2.7 million square feet, making it about 1.5 times larger than Samsung's first Taylor fab. Site preparation has been completed, and construction of the main production building is expected to begin soon. Samsung plans to start installing manufacturing equipment in February 2029, with commercial mass production targeted for 2030 using its advanced 2nm process technology.

However, AMD's reported partnership with Samsung does not necessarily mean that NVIDIA will adopt the same manufacturing approach. Previous reports indicated that NVIDIA had asked memory manufacturers, including Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron, to use TSMC for the production of customized NVHBM base dies.

By consolidating base die production at TSMC, NVIDIA aims to maintain a consistent memory controller architecture and minimize potential variations in latency, thermal performance, and overall efficiency associated with different foundry processes. This approach could also reduce the need for repeated validation of samples from different DRAM manufacturers, simplifying the development and implementation of NVHBM technology.

Nevertheless, Samsung continues to test and validate its own foundry processes to demonstrate its capability to manufacture NVHBM base dies. As its foundry operations increasingly focus on HBM base die development, Samsung could also free up some of its 2nm production capacity for other projects, including next-generation Exynos 5G modems and potential future collaborations with AMD.