Korean stocks move: Samsung Electronics surges 6% driven by dual catalysts LPU+HBM5

格隆汇 March 18｜Samsung Electronics opened with a gap up today, with its gains once expanding to 6%. Since this week, the company has accumulated an increase of over 11%. As of now, its market capitalization has surpassed 1,370 trillion Korean won (approximately $921.2 billions). On the news front, the highly anticipated Groq 3 LPU at this GTC conference has been confirmed to be outsourced to Samsung Electronics for manufacturing, and is expected to be produced using a 4-nanometer process. Han Jin-man, Executive Vice President of Samsung Semiconductor Business, stated that mass production of Groq 3 LPU will begin at the end of the third quarter or the beginning of the fourth quarter this year, and market demand for this chip is expected to further grow next year. "As early as 2023, before Nvidia acquired Groq, Samsung had already started cooperating with Groq," he added. "Samsung engineers were directly involved and also assisted in the design of the LPU." Recently, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote that after Nvidia invested in Groq, the shipment forecast for the LPU has been significantly revised upward. It is expected that the total shipments in 2026 to 2027 will reach 4 million to 5 million units.In addition, in the memory sector, Samsung's next-generation HBM has also made progress. According to Businesskorea, Samsung Electronics has confirmed that it is developing the eighth-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM5), with its underlying chip possibly using a 2-nanometer process. For the ninth-generation HBM5E, the company plans to apply DRAM based on the 1D (seventh-generation 10-nanometer class) process to the core chip ahead of schedule. Hwang Sang-jun, Executive Vice President of Memory Development at Samsung Electronics, said: "As device performance continues to improve, we will continue to apply the most advanced processes to HBM5 and HBM5E."