It's going to be raining dollars over at Samsung: A stamp of approval by Nvidia, plus an incoming price hike for DRAM chips, has lifted shares out of the doldrums

A picture of Samsung's Austin, Texas facility

(Image credit: Samsung)

Even though it's one of the largest manufacturers of memory and flash storage chips in the world, Samsung hasn't been enjoying much success in the stock market in recent times. However, two separate reports might provide the reason why the South Korean semiconductor firm's fortunes are suddenly looking a whole lot rosier.

The first is from The Korea Economic Daily (via Bloomberg), which claims that Samsung's HBM3E RAM chips have finally passed Nvidia's qualification tests for use in its AI mega-processors. High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a type of RAM where multiple memory dies are stacked together to create a single module that can sustain a huge amount of data traffic per second.

Nvidia H100 Hopper PCIe card — The latest version of Nvidia's Hopper chips uses HBM3E. (Image credit: Nvidia)

In the world of memory chips, none of this is remotely surprising, because every manufacturer in the market has been doing this for as long as RAM and flash have been consumer products. The moment that profit margins begin to fall, production is decreased, leading to tighter supply and eventually higher prices.

It takes a while for price increases to filter through the whole supply chain, but eventually, every company that makes graphics cards, RAM kits, SSDs, or anything that uses a memory chip or two will be forced to either absorb the increase in the bill of materials or pass the extra cost onto the customer.

We're unlikely to see all of the aforementioned products go up by 30%, because not every type of RAM and flash will be increased by that amount. We're still probably going to see some kind of price increase, though.

The memory chips that are used in AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards make up a relatively small part of the total price, but since the profit margins on most third-party cards are pretty tight, the additional cost for the RAM chips will be passed on to the consumer.

A close-up photo of a DRAM module in Crucial's 128 GB DDR5-6400 CUDIMM kit. — Micron is also increasing the prices for its DRAM chips. (Image credit: Future)

With a bit of luck, Samsung and the rest of the RAM-making market will just focus on making everything to do with AI processors more expensive, because that's where all the big bucks are right now. PC gaming revenue is peanuts in comparison. But if you're really worried about the cost of it all, then there's a simple solution: just wait.

Just as they have always done, eventually the prices will cycle back down because sales will invariably decline, leading to a surplus of inventory, which Samsung et al will want to shift for newer products. Then you'll see some nice SSD deals or cheap DDR5 RAM kits appearing, just in time for the next generation of processors from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia.

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Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in the early 1980s. After leaving university, he became a physics and IT teacher and started writing about tech in the late 1990s. That resulted in him working with MadOnion to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its PC gaming section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com covering everything and anything to do with tech and PCs. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open-world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days?

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