Cooling Design Drives Competition Among Memory Makers

Chip designs aimed at keeping memory cool have emerged as a new competitive battleground for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) makers that supply AI accelerators, according to The Korea Times. The report describes Samsung Electronics and SK hynix each revealing heat-dissipation structures for their next-generation HBM, making thermal management a central point of differentiation among suppliers.

HBM vendors have been increasing the number of stacked memory dies and raising data-transfer speeds to meet demand for AI computing performance, The Korea Times reports. As stacks grow taller and faster, they generate more heat, and that heat increasingly limits how far the technology can scale. The Korea Herald reports the bottleneck is concentrated at the die-to-die interface that connects the memory stack to the processor.

The Korea Times and The Korea Herald report that SK hynix has detailed a design it calls iHBM, which builds cooling structures directly into the memory and is said to cut thermal resistance by more than 30 percent while holding performance steady under high-load, high-temperature conditions. SK hynix plans to introduce the approach starting with the HBM5 generation, expected around 2029 to 2030, according to The Korea Herald and Tom's Hardware. Samsung Electronics, meanwhile, displayed a mockup of an HBM5 chip with a thermal solution it calls Heat Path Block at COMPUTEX 2026, Tom's Hardware reports.

In the HBM market, bandwidth and capacity have historically driven competition, but thermal performance is becoming a comparable differentiator as AI accelerators pack more memory closer to the processor. Suppliers that can demonstrate effective heat management may gain an edge in qualifying for next-generation accelerator designs, where sustained performance under dense, high-power conditions is a key requirement. Because integrated cooling changes how memory is built and packaged, it also carries implications for manufacturing complexity and cost.

Signals to track include whether SK hynix and Samsung publish independent performance data for their cooling designs, how accelerator makers respond when specifying memory for future products, and whether the die-to-die interface remains the dominant thermal constraint as HBM5 nears production later this decade.