US Commerce Department presses Samsung and SK Hynix to ramp up AI memory production

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has urged South Korea's Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to accelerate the expansion of memory chip production in the United States to help ease a global shortage of components critical to the development of artificial intelligence, Bloomberg reports.

Why AI is running short on memory

Explosive demand for accelerators used to train and run inference on large language models has sharply increased consumption of memory chips. The biggest driver is high-performance HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), which sits next to the GPU in AI servers, but conventional DRAM is also affected as manufacturers increasingly redirect it toward data center needs. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are, along with US-based Micron, the world's largest memory chipmakers, and most of their production capacity is concentrated in South Korea.

• The request comes from US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
• It is addressed to Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix
• The goal is to expand memory chip output specifically on US soil
• The reason is a global shortage of components critical to AI development

What's behind Washington's pressure

The demand fits into the US administration's broader push to bring semiconductor manufacturing onto American soil, a strategy that ranges from subsidy programs for building fabs to direct political pressure on key Asian suppliers. Both Korean giants already have a US presence: SK Hynix previously announced plans to build an HBM packaging plant in Indiana, and Samsung is building a manufacturing complex in Texas. Still, most of their memory production capacity remains in South Korea.

Why memory became the bottleneck

Memory remains one of the few segments of the chip market where the US has historically depended on South Korean and Taiwanese manufacturers. In logic chips and GPUs, Nvidia and AMD drive demand and TSMC handles supply. Memory for AI servers works differently: it competes for the same production lines as memory for smartphones and PCs, so the HBM shortage is felt across the entire industry.

How the memory shortage is hitting the market

Surging demand for HBM and DRAM from AI data centers has already driven memory prices noticeably higher in other markets as well. Prices for PC modules, general-purpose servers, and smartphones have risen as manufacturers shift production lines toward higher-margin orders from AI companies. That turns the memory shortage from a niche industry issue into a problem felt across all of electronics.

What it means

The pressure on Samsung and SK Hynix shows that Washington no longer sees the memory shortage as just a market problem, but as a question of national technological competitiveness in the AI race.