Samsung used the Future of Memory and Storage conference in Santa Clara this week to unveil concept designs for two new 3D memory architectures aimed at AI workloads, part of an effort to close ground on rival SK Hynix in the fast-growing market for high-bandwidth memory. The centerpiece is what Samsung calls zHBM, or Z-axis High Bandwidth Memory, which stacks memory directly on top of an AI accelerator rather than positioning it beside the processor as current designs do.
By shortening the physical distance data has to travel between processor and memory, Samsung says the vertical arrangement should raise bandwidth and cut power consumption during the large-scale training and inference runs that dominate AI data center workloads. The company said a future interface system built around zHBM could deliver roughly eight times the performance of HBM5, a memory standard that itself has not yet reached the market — an indication that zHBM remains a multi-generation concept rather than a near-term product. Samsung did not announce a commercial availability date for the design.
A Denser NAND Chip, Too
Alongside zHBM, Samsung showed a second concept called zNAND-O and detailed its V10 flash memory chip, which packs more than 400 layers using a wafer-bonding process and offers about 58 percent higher density than the company's previous V9 generation, according to details reported by StorageNewsletter. Both are aimed at the same customer base: makers of AI accelerators and the cloud providers and model developers who buy them, all of whom are pushing for memory that can keep pace with increasingly data-hungry chips.
The announcement comes as Samsung works to recover market share in HBM after yield problems slowed its HBM4 rollout. Industry estimates cited by several trade publications this year put SK Hynix's share of the HBM4 market at roughly half, with Samsung and Micron splitting most of the remainder — a reversal from Samsung's earlier position as a memory-market leader. Samsung's advantages in the rivalry are less about current shipments than about scale: its DRAM manufacturing base and balance sheet give it room to keep investing in next-generation designs like zHBM even while it works through near-term supply issues, betting that being early to a 3D-stacked architecture will matter more over time than this year's market-share numbers.
