Samsung GDDR7 DRAM wins presidential recognition

Samsung Electronics' Graphics Double Data Rate 7 DRAM / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics

Samsung Electronics’ Graphics Double Data Rate 7 (GDDR7) DRAM won presidential recognition on Wednesday, as its technological competitiveness continues to gain industry attention amid the rise in demand for artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing.

At the 2025 Korea Tech Festival in Seoul, hosted by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources, the government awarded a presidential honor to Samsung’s world-first 12-nanometer-class, 40-gigabit-per-second, 24-gigabyte GDDR7.

This is the 12th time that the company has received the presidential commendation, the highest number awarded to a single company. It won the recognition with the 14-nanometer-class DDR5 in 2022 and the 64-layer three-dimension V-NAND Flash in 2017.

GDDR7 is a DRAM optimized for graphics processing and AI computing, and its market value is surging as demand for general DRAM in AI accelerators continues to rise. Compared with high-bandwidth memory (HBM), GDDR7 is cheaper, offers greater power efficiency, and imposes lighter system workloads, making it an attractive alternative as the AI market shifts toward inferencing.

The workload of AI accelerators can be categorized into two key tasks: training, where the AI learns from data, and inferencing, where the AI applies that learning to solve problems. Until recently, data center operators and AI chipmakers sought to boost overall performance for both functions by pairing logic chips with expensive HBM. As demand for inferencing surges, however, the industry is increasingly shifting toward inference-optimized chips using GDDR instead of HBM to reduce total system cost.

Market tracker TrendForce projects that demand for GDDR7 will rise sharply, driven by its growing adoption in new AI chips, such as Nvidia’s RTX 5090 graphics processing unit (GPU). In September, Nvidia also announced that its Rubin CPX, an inference-focused GPU, will be equipped 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 said. “The premium pricing of GDDR7 is likely to drive profitability improvements in Samsung’s DRAM business going forward.”