AI TRENDS | Samsung Unveils zHBM, Targets 10x Faster AI Response Speeds

Samsung Electronics has introduced zHBM, a memory technology that can be stacked directly on top of AI chips in 3D. According to Sina Finance, Samsung said the breakthrough is aimed at boosting the response speed of existing AI systems by more than 10 times. On September 16, Kim Indong, head of memory product planning at Samsung America Semiconductor Division (DSA), delivered a keynote at the AI Infrastructure Summit at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California, outlining a paradigm shift in AI storage chips. Kim said current conversational AI systems have a per-user response ceiling of about 100 tokens per second, and Samsung aims to raise that to 1,000 tokens per second for the coming AI agent era. Samsung also released a technology roadmap for zNAND-O, a NAND flash-based 3D storage solution for the edge AI market. Kim said that by 2030, local deployment of trillion-parameter large models on devices such as AI workstations will become common, and that using zNAND-O instead of DRAM to build memory for trillion-parameter models would cost only one-sixth as much. Samsung plans to begin supplying zNAND-O samples to customers on a large scale from 2028.