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| A webpage of ChatGPT / Captured from ChatGPT |
Rise of AI service could open new opportunities for Korean memory chipmakers
By Baek Byung-yeul
Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are expected to benefit from emerging artificial intelligence (AI) services such as ChatGPT due to surging demand at processing centers for high-performance memory chips that can handle more data as AI technology becomes increasingly widespread, according to industry officials and analysts, Sunday.
ChatGPT is a chatbot or conversational AI service launched by U.S.-based AI company OpenAI last November. Unlike previous chat-based AI services, ChatGPT has seen an explosive increase in demand across the world because it feels like talking to a real person with deep knowledge in a diverse range of topics.
Experts said ChatGPT shows how AI can reach human-level capabilities through technological progress. The service has prompted IT giants such as Microsoft and Google to launch commercialized AI services.
They added that ChatGPT not only induces changes at IT companies, but also brings enormous benefits to memory semiconductor makers through the expansion of diverse kinds of AI-based applications, such as voice recognition, translation, autonomous driving and image classification.
"Demand for memory chips for servers and data centers was driven by the increasing use of cloud computing services, but we expect a new market will be pioneered as AI services like ChatGPT will eventually increase the need to expand data centers to smoothly process enormous amounts of information," an official at a local chip company said on condition of anonymity. "Especially high-performance memory chips, such as high-bandwidth memory (HBM) or processing-in-memory (PIM), will consequently increase."
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Samsung and SK hynix have already developed or supplied products to respond to the explosive growth of the memory semiconductor market for AI services. Market tracker Gartner recently estimated the size of the AI chip market to grow to $86.1 billion in 2026 from $22 billion in 2020.
Samsung, the world's leading memory chipmaker, already developed HBM-PIM technology, in conjunction with U.S.-based chip design company AMD last October, which combines memory chips with AI processors. The technology has twice the average performance and reduced energy consumption by half compared to conventional graphics processing units (GPUs).
"We expect interactive AI services to have a positive impact on future memory demand," Kim Jae-june, executive vice president of Samsung's memory business, told investors during a conference call on Jan. 31, adding that high-performance memory chips will be essential for these services.
SK hynix is also responding to growing demand for high-performance memory chips by supplying its HBM3 chips to a global leading chip design company since June, 2022, which have greater capacity and improved data processing speeds.
Park Myoung-soo, head of DRAM marketing at SK hynix, told investors on Feb. 1, "ChatGPT will bring a great ripple effect in terms of the scalability of language models and the generalization and commercialization of AI among the public."
Not only ChatGPT and Google's Bard, but Korean companies are also working on launching their own conversational AI services. Korean tech companies believe their services, targeting Korean-speaking users, will be better than English-based ones.
Naver, the top internet company in Korea, said on Feb. 3 that it will roll out its own conversational AI service, SearchGPT, within the first half of 2023 in order to offer more convenient web search experiences to its users. The company also forged a partnership with Samsung last December to jointly develop AI semiconductor solutions.
"We are preparing measures in response to new search trends, such as generative AI. Our goal is to introduce Naver's own improved search service called SearchGPT within the first half of this year," Choi Soo-yeon, CEO of the company, said.
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