Samsung Electronics' GDDR7 DRAM received recognition from the president on for its technological competitiveness, attracting attention from the industry due to the increasing demand for AI inferencing.
In Seoul, the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Resources hosted the Korea Tech Festival in 2025, where the government recognized Samsung with a presidential award for their groundbreaking achievement in developing the world's first 12-nanometer-class, 40-gigabit-per-second, 24-gigabyte GDDR7 technology.
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This marks the 12th occasion that the company has been recognized with the highest presidential commendation, making them the most awarded company in this regard.
The achievement was earned for their development of the 14-nanometer-class DDR5 in 2022 and the 64-layer three-dimensional V-NAND Flash in 2017.
GDDR7 is a type of DRAM specifically designed for graphics processing and AI computing. Its popularity is on the rise due to the increasing demand for general DRAM in AI accelerators.
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GDDR7 is more cost-effective and energy-efficient compared to high-bandwidth memory (HBM). It also puts less strain on system resources, making it a desirable option for AI applications focusing on inferencing.
AI accelerators have two main responsibilities: training, which involves learning from data, and inferencing, which involves applying that knowledge to problem-solving.
Historically, data center operators and AI chip manufacturers focused on enhancing performance for both tasks by combining logic chips with costly HBM. However, as the need for inferencing grows, there is a trend in the industry towards using GDDR instead of HBM in inference-optimized chips to decrease overall system expenses.
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Market research firm TrendForce forecasts a significant increase in the demand for GDDR7, primarily driven by its increasing usage in new AI chips like Nvidia's RTX 5090 GPU. Nvidia recently revealed that its Rubin CPX GPU, designed for inference tasks, will come with 128GB of GDDR7.
“Recently, Nvidia requested a significant increase in GDDR7 supply from Samsung Electronics, and production capacity at the company’s line in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, is expected to more than double,” KB Securities analyst Kim Dong-won says. “The premium pricing of GDDR7 is likely to drive profitability improvements in Samsung’s DRAM business going forward.”