Micron Sells Out Entire HBM3E Supply for 2024, Most of 2025
by Anton Shilov on March 22, 2024 11:00 AM ESTBeing the first company to ship HBM3E memory has its perks for Micron, as the company has revealed that is has managed to sell out the entire supply of its advanced high-bandwidth memory for 2024, while most of their 2025 production has been allocated, as well. Micron's HBM3E memory (or how Micron alternatively calls it, HBM3 Gen2) was one of the first to be qualified for NVIDIA's updated H200/GH200 accelerators, so it looks like the DRAM maker will be a key supplier to the green company.
"Our HBM is sold out for calendar 2024, and the overwhelming majority of our 2025 supply has already been allocated," said Sanjay Mehrotra, chief executive of Micron, in prepared remarks for the company's earnings call this week. "We continue to expect HBM bit share equivalent to our overall DRAM bit share sometime in calendar 2025."
Micron's first HBM3E product is an 8-Hi 24 GB stack with a 1024-bit interface, 9.2 GT/s data transfer rate, and a total bandwidth of 1.2 TB/s. NVIDIA's H200 accelerator for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing will use six of these cubes, providing a total of 141 GB of accessible high-bandwidth memory.
"We are on track to generate several hundred million dollars of revenue from HBM in fiscal 2024 and expect HBM revenues to be accretive to our DRAM and overall gross margins starting in the fiscal third quarter," said Mehrotra.
The company has also began sampling its 12-Hi 36 GB stacks that offer a 50% more capacity. These KGSDs will ramp in 2025 and will be used for next generations of AI products. Meanwhile, it does not look like NVIDIA's B100 and B200 are going to use 36 GB HBM3E stacks, at least initially.
Demand for artificial intelligence servers set records last year, and it looks like it is going to remain high this year as well. Some analysts believe that NVIDIA's A100 and H100 processors (as well as their various derivatives) commanded as much as 80% of the entire AI processor market in 2023. And while this year NVIDIA will face tougher competition from AMD, AWS, D-Matrix, Intel, Tenstorrent, and other companies on the inference front, it looks like NVIDIA's H200 will still be the processor of choice for AI training, especially for big players like Meta and Microsoft, who already run fleets consisting of hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA accelerators. With that in mind, being a primary supplier of HBM3E for NVIDIA's H200 is a big deal for Micron as it enables it to finally capture a sizeable chunk of the HBM market, which is currently dominated by SK Hynix and Samsung, and where Micron controlled only about 10% as of last year.
Meanwhile, since every DRAM device inside an HBM stack has a wide interface, it is physically bigger than regular DDR4 or DDR5 ICs. As a result, the ramp of HBM3E memory will affect bit supply of commodity DRAMs from Micron, the company said.
"The ramp of HBM production will constrain supply growth in non-HBM products," Mehrotra said. "Industrywide, HBM3E consumes approximately three times the wafer supply as DDR5 to produce a given number of bits in the same technology node."
Source: Micron
27 Comments
View All Comments
BvOvO - Tuesday, April 9, 2024 - link
NVIDIA:"Company type Public"
Samus - Thursday, March 28, 2024 - link
Micron doesn't have the potential production volume for HBM3 of Hynix or Samsung, but as the later two companies have yet to ship anything, at the moment, Micron has the entire pie, and assuming Hynix and Samsung ship on time, the average for the fiscal year will put Micron ahead, even if Hynix ships a higher volume they would have to do it at an exponential rate by Fall.kkww - Wednesday, March 27, 2024 - link
Dante Verizon is correct and you are so wrong it's not even funny. Maybe you should learn how to google better.Samus - Thursday, March 28, 2024 - link
Maybe you should learn what business fiscal year production is.Dante Verizon - Friday, March 22, 2024 - link
Micron's HBM production volume and yields are quite limited.ballsystemlord - Friday, March 22, 2024 - link
Could you give a link for that claim? I'd like to read more on the matter. Why are their yields so bad?Terry_Craig - Saturday, March 23, 2024 - link
We are talking about a complex product. SK Hynix has a special technology that allows it to reap the highest yield among the three HBM manufacturers, which is why it has 80% of the market in its hands."One of the reasons Samsung has fallen behind is its decision to stick with chip making technology called non-conductive film (NCF) that causes some production issues, while Hynix switched to the mass reflow molded underfill (MR-MUF) method to address NCF's weakness, according to analysts and industry watchers."
Adramtech - Saturday, March 23, 2024 - link
That’s an unverified beliefSamus - Monday, March 25, 2024 - link
People love just making shit up around here, like they know the inner workings of these companies yields - literally trade secrets - and production capacity for a product that's barely been in volume production for a few months. Hynix just started volume production on March 19th 2024Dante Verizon - Monday, March 25, 2024 - link
Sk Hynix has 80% of the HBM market, fool