‘Wean itself away from Nvidia’: Samsung signs $750 million deal with South Korea’s largest online platform – Naver wants to replace Nvidia’s super-expensive AI GPU with the more affordable Mach-1 chip
In an effort to reduce its dependence on Nvidia’s expensive AI chips, Naver, the South Korean equivalent of Google, has signed a 1 trillion won ($750 million) deal with Samsung.
The deal will see the tech giant supply its cheaper Mach-1 chips to Naver by the end of 2024.
The Mach-1 chip, currently in development, is an AI accelerator in the form of a SoC that combines Samsung’s own processors and low-power DRAM chips to reduce the bottleneck between the GPU and HBM.
Just the beginning
The Mach-1 announcement was made during Samsung’s 55th Annual Shareholders’ Meeting. Samsung Semiconductor CEO Kye Hyun Kyung said the chip design has passed technology validation on FPGAs and SoC finalization is underway.
The exact quantity of Mach-1 chips to be supplied and the prices are still being discussed The Korean Economic Journal reports that Samsung plans to price the Mach-1 AI chip at around $3,756 each. The order is expected to be somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 units.
Naver plans to use Samsung’s Mach-1 chips to power servers for its AI mapping service, Naver Place. According to The Korean Economic Journal, Naver will order more Mach-1 chips if the first batch performs as well as hoped.
Samsung sees this deal with Naver as just the beginning. The tech giant is reportedly in supply talks with Microsoft and Meta Platforms who, like Naver, are actively trying to reduce their dependence on Nvidia’s AI hardware.
With the Naver deal, Samsung also aims to better compete with its South Korean rival SK Hynix, the dominant player in the advanced HBM segment. Samsung has been investing heavily in HBM lately, announcing the industry’s first 12-stack HBM3E 12H DRAM in early March. This is said to outperform Micron’s 24GB 8H HBM3E in terms of capacity and bandwidth and is expected to hit the market in the second quarter of this year.