About $4 Billion a Month of Korea's AI Memory Goes to Taiwan, Then Into AI Chips

About $4 Billion a Month of Korea's AI Memory Goes to Taiwan, Then Into AI Chips

Taiwan is the biggest export destination for one of South Korea's most profitable memory chips, but Taiwan is not the one using it.

The chip is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, stacked next to an AI processor to feed it data at high speed. South Korea's SK Hynix and Samsung are its main suppliers. According to South Korean export data compiled by semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis, HBM shipments to Taiwan, on a three-month average, peaked at about $4 billion a month in mid-2026. Before 2023 they were only $200 million to $300 million a month.

The memory goes to Taiwan to be packaged. AI chips from Nvidia and others go through TSMC's CoWoS advanced packaging, which places the processor and several HBM stacks on the same substrate before the finished part is shipped off for server assembly. So the destination in export data shows where the packaging plant is, not who is paying.

The same chart shows shipments to Malaysia rising from almost nothing to about $1.4 billion a month. Industry publication Digitimes reports that Intel is expanding advanced packaging capacity in Malaysia and has begun to draw away some of the HBM that used to flow to Taiwan.

These figures are estimated from customs product codes and may include other multi-chip memory, so the trend is more reliable than the exact dollar amounts.

Source: SemiAnalysis, Digitimes (Image: @jukan05)