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A Samsung Electronics Co. 12-layer HBM3E, top, and other DDR modules arranged in Seoul, South Korea, on Thursday, April 4, 2024. Samsung’s profit rebounded sharply in the first quarter of 2024, reflecting a turnaround in the company’s pivotal semiconductor division and robust sales of Galaxy S24 smartphones. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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High-performance memory chips are likely to remain in tight supply this year, as explosive AI demand drives a shortage for these chips, according to analysts.

SK Hynix and Micron – two of the world’s largest memory chip suppliers – are out of high-bandwidth memory chips for 2024, while the stock for 2025 is also nearly sold out, according to the firms.

We expect the general memory supply to remain tight throughout 2024,” Kazunori Ito, director of equity research at Morningstar said in a report last week.

The demand for AI chipsets has boosted the high-end memory chip market, hugely benefiting firms such Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the top two memory chipmakers in the world. While SK Hynix already supplies chips to Nvidia, the company is reportedly considering Samsung as a potential supplier too.

High-performance memory chips play a crucial role in the training of large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which led AI adoption to skyrocket. LLMs need these chips to remember details from past conversations with users and their preferences to generate human-like responses to queries.

“The manufacturing of these chips are more complex and ramping up production has been difficult. This likely sets up shortages through the rest of 2024 and through much of 2025,” said William Bailey, director at Nasdaq IR Intelligence.

HBM’s production cycle is longer by 1.5 to 2 months compared with DDR5 memory chip commonly found in personal computers and servers, market intelligence firm TrendForce said in March.

Samsung gets $6.4 billion for chip plants

To meet soaring demand, SK Hynix plans to expand production capacity by investing in advanced packaging facilities in Indiana, U.S. as well as in the M15X fab in Cheongju and the Yongin semiconductor cluster in South Korea.

Samsung during its first-quarter earnings call in April said its HBM bit supply in 2024 “expanded by more than threefold versus last year.” Chip capacity refers to the number of bits of data a memory chip can store.

“And we have already completed discussions with our customers with that committed supply. In 2025, we will continue to expand supply by at least two times or more year on year, and we’re already in smooth talks with our customers on that supply,” Samsung said.

Micron didn’t respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Intense competition

Big Tech companies Microsoft, Amazon and Google are spending billions to train their own LLMs to stay competitive, fueling demand for AI chips.

“The big buyers of AI chips – firms like Meta and Microsoft – have signaled they plan to keep pouring resources into building AI infrastructure. This means they will be buying large volumes of AI chips, including HBM, at least through 2024,” said Chris Miller, author of “Chip War,” a book on the semiconductor industry.

Chipmakers are in a fierce race to manufacture the most advanced memory chips in the market to capture the AI boom.

SK Hynix in a press conference earlier this month said that it would begin mass production of its latest generation of HBM chips, the 12-layer HBM3E, in the third quarter, while Samsung Electronics plans to do so within the second quarter, having been the first in the industry to ship samples of the latest chip.

“Currently Samsung is ahead in 12-layer HBM3E sampling process. If they can get qualification earlier than its peers, I assume it can get majority shares in end-2024 and 2025,” said SK Kim, executive director and analyst at Daiwa Securities.

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are ‘not good’

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are 'not good'

President Trump’s new tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from over 100 countries will have an effect on consumers, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC on Friday. Investors will feel the pain, too.

Microsoft’s stock dropped almost 6% in the past two days, as the Nasdaq wrapped up its worst week in five years.

“As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good,” Ballmer said, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin that was tied to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration. “It creates opportunity to be a serious, long-term player.”

Ballmer was sandwiched in between Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and current CEO Satya Nadella for the interview.

“I took just enough economics in college — that tariffs are actually going to bring some turmoil,” said Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014. Gates, Microsoft’s first CEO, convinced Ballmer to join the company in 1980.

Gates, Ballmer and Nadella attended proceedings at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Friday to celebrate its first half-century.

Between the tariffs and weak quarterly revenue guidance announced in January, Microsoft’s stock is on track for its fifth straight month of declines, which would be the worst stretch since 2009. But the company remains a leader in the PC operating system and productivity software markets, and its partnership with startup OpenAI has led to gains in cloud computing.

“I think that disruption is very hard on people, and so the decision to do something for which disruption was inevitable, that needs a lot of popular support, and nobody could game theorize exactly who is going to do what in response,” Ballmer said, regarding the tariffs. “So, I think citizens really like stability a lot. And I hope people — individuals who will feel this, because people are feeling it, not just the stock market, people are going to feel it.”

Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, is among Microsoft’s biggest fans. He said he’s the company’s largest investor. In 2014, shortly after he bought the basketball team for $2 billion, he held over 333 million shares of the stock, according to a regulatory filing.

“I’m not going to probably have 50 more years on the planet,” he said. “But whatever minutes I have, I’m gonna be a large Microsoft shareholder.” He said there’s a bright future for computing, storage and intelligence. Microsoft launched the first Azure services while Ballmer was CEO.

Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Microsoft, which pledged to spend $80 billion on AI-enabled data center infrastructure in the current fiscal year, has stopped discussions or pushed back the opening of facilities in the U.S. and abroad.

JPMorgan Chase’s chief economist, Bruce Kasman, said in a Thursday note that the chance of a global recession will be 60% if Trump’s tariffs kick in as described. His previous estimate was 40%.

“Fifty years from now, or 25 years from now, what is the one thing you can be guaranteed of, is the world needs more compute,” Nadella said. “So I want to keep those two thoughts and then take one step at a time, and then whatever are the geopolitical or economic shifts, we’ll adjust to it.”

Gates, who along with co-founder Paul Allen, sought to build a software company rather than sell both software and hardware, said he wasn’t sure what the economic effects of the tariffs will be. Today, most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from software. It also sells Surface PCs and Xbox consoles.

“So far, it’s just on goods, but you know, will it eventually be on services? Who knows?” said Gates, who reportedly donated around $50 million to a nonprofit that supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ losing campaign.

— CNBC’s Alex Harring contributed to this report.

WATCH: There will be many LLM winners, says infrastructure investor Morrison

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AppLovin can offer TikTok ‘much stronger bid than others,’ CEO says

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AppLovin can offer TikTok 'much stronger bid than others,' CEO says

Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.

Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.

“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.

The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid. 

“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.

AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.

Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.

WATCH: AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

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Trump’s tariff rates for other countries radically larger than World Trade data

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Trump's tariff rates for other countries radically larger than World Trade data

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event announcing new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2025.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy this week, leaving many economists and U.S. trade partners to question how the White House calculated its rates.

Trump’s plan established a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country, though many nations such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to much steeper rates. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump held up a poster board that outlined the tariffs that it claims are “charged” to the U.S., as well as the “discounted” reciprocal tariffs that America would implement in response.

Those reciprocal tariffs are mostly about half of what the Trump administration said each country has charged the U.S. The poster suggests China charges a tariff of 67%, for instance, and that the U.S. will implement a 34% reciprocal tariff in response.

However, a report from the Cato Institute suggests the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much different than the figures touted by the Trump administration. The report is based on trade-weighted average duty rates from the World Trade Organization in 2023, the most recent year available.

The Cato Institute says the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate from China was 3%. Similarly, the administration says the EU charges the U.S. a tariff of 39%, while the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 2.7%, according to the report.

In India, the Trump administration claims that a 52% tariff is charged against the U.S., but Cato found that the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 12%.

Many users on social media this week were quick to notice that the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. It’s an unusual approach, as it suggests that the U.S. factored in the trade deficit in goods but ignored trade in services.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative briefly explained its approach in a release, and stated that computing the combined effects of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in various countries “can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”

If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said in the release.

There is at least a 60% chance of recession if Trump's tariffs stick, says JPMorgan's David Kelly

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