Korea to retain memory chip lead through 2031 on Samsung, SK hynix investment: Yole Group

Korea is expected to maintain its position as the global leader in the memory semiconductor market through 2031, driven by aggressive investment from Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, according to a forecast by French market research firm Yole Group.

The forecast was based on the Korean government's plan to double the country's semiconductor wafer production capacity within the next five years, as well as continued aggressive investment by Samsung Electronics and SK hynix. Josephine Lau, an analyst at Yole Group, made the remark Tuesday at FMS 2026, a memory semiconductor conference held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California.

It was also pointed out that global memory semiconductor demand has shifted significantly due to U.S. export restrictions on China.

The United States accounted for 52 percent of global memory consumption last year, up from 37 percent in 2021. China's share, meanwhile, fell to 29 percent from 35 percent over the same period, reflecting the impact of U.S. semiconductor restrictions.

Combined, the United States and China accounted for 81 percent of global memory consumption last year, up from 72 percent in 2021. This indicates that global demand has become increasingly concentrated in the world's two largest economies.

Lau said the memory semiconductor industry has now moved beyond the AI training-focused "AI 1.0" era into the inference-driven "AI 2.0" stage.

The transition is expected to shorten product development cycles significantly and place greater pressure on memory manufacturers. While new products have traditionally taken about 18 months to develop, companies may soon need to launch new products within 12 months, according to Lau.

As a result, the ability to respond quickly to rapidly changing market conditions and customer demands is expected to become a key competitive advantage for memory chipmakers.

Nvidia's dominance in the high bandwidth memory (HBM) market for AI chips is also expected to weaken somewhat.

Avril Wu, senior vice president of research at Taiwan-based market research firm TrendForce, projected that Nvidia's share of the HBM market will decline to 58 percent this year from 66 percent last year.

The decline is being driven by large cloud service providers, including Google with its in-house tensor processing units, or TPUs, aggressively expanding the adoption of custom-designed chips as alternatives to Nvidia's processors.

Chinese memory chipmakers are also closing the technology gap.

Yole Group's analysis of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, chips produced by China's CXMT found that the company has reached the level of the industry's third-generation 10-nanometer-class 1z process, a technology that leading memory manufacturers first achieved in 2019.

BY JEONG JAE-HONG [kim.jiye@joongang.co.kr]