SEOUL, December 03 (AJP) - Samsung Electronics’ latest graphics memory was recognized by South Korea’s government as a key technology underpinning the country’s future AI competitiveness, amid growing industry focus on AI inference rather than model training.
At the 2025 Korea Tech Festival, hosted by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy at COEX in Seoul on Wednesday, Samsung received the Korea Technology Awards Presidential Prize for its 12-nanometer, 40 gigabits-per-second, 24-gigabit GDDR7 DRAM, according to Samsung. The award is granted annually to technologies judged to have made outstanding contributions to national industrial competitiveness.
The company said the GDDR7 product is designed for graphics processing and AI computation, and has been adopted across use cases including high-end graphics cards, gaming consoles, laptops and data center servers that require thermal stability and reliability.
The award comes as the AI industry shifts part of its focus from model training to inference, where cost efficiency and power consumption have become increasingly important. GDDR7 offers advantages over high-bandwidth memory (HBM) in terms of cost, power efficiency and form factor, making it suitable for large-scale inference deployments, Samsung said.
Major AI platform companies are expanding adoption of graphics memory for inference workloads. Nvidia has said it plans to equip its Rubin CPX inference-focused GPU with up to 128 gigabytes of GDDR7, a move analysts say could broaden demand for high-speed graphics DRAM.
Market research firm TrendForce has forecast that demand for GDDR7 will rise sharply alongside growing GPU shipments for edge AI and generative AI applications, including Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 5090 series.
Samsung has been expanding its portfolio of next-generation memory products alongside GDDR7. The company said its sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory product, HBM4, based on 1c DRAM, is undergoing customer evaluation, while development is also under way for compute express link (CXL) memory modules using the CXL 3.1 standard.
In addition, Samsung’s advanced research arm has published research on ferroelectric transistor technology for low-power NAND flash in the journal Nature, which the company said could significantly reduce power consumption if commercialized.
Samsung also said several of its semiconductor products, including a quantum security chip and next-generation mobile memory, have been selected for innovation awards ahead of the CES 2026 technology show in Las Vegas.
The Korea Technology Awards are presented annually by the government to recognize technologies deemed to strengthen the country’s industrial competitiveness, with winners selected from corporate research and development achievements.
reporter
Candice Kim
candicekim1121@ajupress.com
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