Samsung Electronics has begun building a hybrid-bonding mass-production line at its Pyeongtaek P5 fab, and has picked Dutch equipment maker BE Semiconductor Industries (Besi) as its preferred supplier, ordering around 50 die-to-wafer bonding machines, according to Jukan citing industry sources. Hybrid bonding is a next-generation chip-stacking method that fuses the copper wiring on two chips directly together instead of using tiny metal bumps in between, which tightens the gap between chip layers and improves speed and power efficiency. The new line is meant to produce next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the fast memory chips that sit next to AI processors, along with logic chips. In a separate but related post, Jukan notes hybrid bonding now looks set for Nvidia's upcoming Feynman AI chip generation using custom HBM, and that the technology's rollout has been pushed back from the more conventional HBM4E timeline, in line with recent TrendForce reporting that the industry may only be ready for it around 16-high HBM4E stacks. Samsung has trailed SK hynix in HBM market share and is treating this equipment order as a concrete step toward catching up.
Why it matters · HBM is the bottleneck component for AI chips, and whoever masters denser, faster stacking gets a bigger slice of Nvidia and AMD's next-gen orders. A real equipment order, not just a roadmap slide, is the clearest sign yet that Samsung is putting money behind its attempt to close the gap with SK hynix in HBM.
Worth asking · Samsung has repeatedly promised an HBM comeback that hasn't fully shown up in market share yet. Does a concrete equipment order like this change that story, or is it still too early to tell versus SK hynix's own hybrid-bonding pilot line?