Samsung reveals that customers are "very satisfied" with HBM4, warning that the imbalance between supply and demand in advanced storage will become normal in the next two years.

A senior executive at Samsung Electronics said on Wednesday that with the accelerated development of global artificial intelligence infrastructure, the strong growth momentum of the storage chip market will not only continue throughout 2026, but will also extend steadily into 2027. The core logic behind this sustained prosperity lies in the rigid demand for high-spec memory in AI servers. Song Jai-hyuk, Chief Technology Officer of Samsung's chip division, also stated at the Semicon trade show on Wednesday that the feedback from customers on the company's next-generation high-bandwidth memory chip (HBM4) was "very satisfactory." Meanwhile, Kim Jae-june, head of Samsung's storage business, delved into the structural constraints on the supply side, pointing out that due to the extremely limited clean room space for global chip manufacturing, the construction cycle of new capacity is far longer than the speed of market demand explosion, leading to a normalization of supply-demand imbalance for advanced storage products in the next two years. From a market financial performance perspective, this supply-demand gap has evolved into a profit engine for chip giants. By the first quarter of 2026, global memory prices had nearly doubled in a short period of time, directly driving Samsung Electronics to achieve a record high of 200 trillion Korean won in operating profit in the fourth quarter of 2025. As major manufacturers are increasingly shifting limited capacity towards the higher-profit HBM field, this capacity squeeze effect is gradually spreading downstream. Analysts predict that by 2027, the supply of enterprise SSDs and general-purpose memory will continue to be tight, which will not only raise the operating costs of data centers, but may also lead to sustained pricing pressure on end products in the consumer electronics market. Looking ahead to the industry landscape over the next three years, Samsung is accelerating the establishment of its long-term competitive barriers. 2026 will be seen as the pivotal year for the large-scale delivery of HBM4, while the true large-scale release of capacity will have to wait until between 2027 and 2028, when Samsung's P5 factory and other competitors' next-generation fabs are officially put into operation. Before that, the storage chip market will maintain its high-level operation, and the focus of industry competition will shift from simple scale expansion to a comprehensive competition in advanced packaging technology and advanced process delivery capabilities.