Samsung’s attempt to halt NVIDIA’s dominance

The recent boom in AI has sent Nvidia’s value soaring, allowing it to overtake Microsoft and become the world’s most valuable company in June of this year, with a market value of $3.34 trillion.

Naturally The company’s position is highly appreciated by competitors, One of the companies aiming to compete in the chip sector is Samsung. The South Korean manufacturer, known in Brazil for its mobile phones and home appliances, Investing millions of dollars in hardware focused entirely on AI.

HE Samsung’s main project to intensify this dispute is the System on Chip (SoC) Mach-1.The company announced the chip in March this year and aims to rival not just Nvidia but also its biggest rival in the HBM memory segment, SK Hynix.

Mach-1, like Blackwell graphics chips, has an architecture that aims to accelerate tasks with artificial intelligence. The component is not intended to serve end users, but to meet the needs of large companies and data centers.

What is Samsung Mach-1?

As an AI accelerator, Mach-1 works to reduce the bottleneck between graphics processing units (GPUs) and high-bandwidth memories (HBMs). To achieve this, the chipset leverages the company’s processors and low-power DRAM chips, thus maintaining high performance but with low power consumption – according to Samsung, this is even lower than equivalent solutions from Nvidia.

One customer on the horizon is Naver Corporation, a South Korean internet company based in Seongnam, South Korea. Korean Economic DailySamsung will supply between 150,000 and 200,000 Mach-1 motherboards with each unit priced at $3,800, a deal worth almost $752 million.

The deal allows Naver to reduce its dependence on Nvidia supplies, while also Making room for Samsung in high-performance chip sectorThe expectation is that Naver will use Mach-1 in its AI inference servers, that is, in the machine learning process.

However Samsung plans to expand operations into North America. Still according to Korean Economic DailyThe manufacturer would hold talks with Big Tech companies like Microsoft and Meta.

Promise for 2025

Expectations are high, but the Mach-1 is still in development, with the new AI accelerator chip expected to enter the prototype-to-production cycle later this year. There’s plenty of time for Nvidia to further solidify its presence in the industry.

The South Korean company aims to become a major hardware provider for artificial intelligence.

In a way, Leading AI service providers must support the fightIf Samsung enters the market with a quality product, this will force Nvidia to launch equivalent solutions at more competitive prices.

Being based in South Korea could be a big advantage for Samsung in this dispute, where the company has access to highly influential customers who are looking to move away from dependence on Nvidia and eventually expand their operations outside the country.

The process is slow, and it’s clear that other obstacles could arise over time, including other competitors. One possible competitor could be Microsoft, which would use Intel’s factories to manufacture its own chips, but it doesn’t say what those would be.

Advances in research

Another millionaire investment by Samsung is in laboratories dedicated to the development of new semiconductors. In March this year, the South Korean firm opened new offices focused on chipmaking For large-scale language models (LLMs) that focus on inference; hence the training and hosting of these models.

According to Kyung Kye-Hyun, head of the futures business division, Samsung aims to launch new chip designs and an ‘iterative model’ Able to deliver better performance and meet the increasing demand for models, but without the same amount of production or energy costs.

The fruits of this new Samsung business will take some time to emerge, but they do strengthen the company’s interest in competing with Nvidia.