Korea’s HBM priority and China’s shift to domestic AI chips set the Asia tech agenda into the weekend

As markets head into the weekend, two Asia-Pacific dynamics are shaping global tech decisions. South Korea’s drive to anchor advanced memory at home keeps SK Hynix and Samsung at the center of AI supply chains, and Chinese AI providers are building more workloads on Huawei’s Ascend accelerators as U.S. export rules continue to limit access to Nvidia parts.

The focus matters for procurement and deployment timelines. HBM availability and advanced packaging throughput still gate deliveries of Nvidia class systems, and China facing restricted access keeps fragmenting software stacks across Nvidia CUDA and domestic accelerators.

Korean HBM capacity in focus

TrendForce has estimated SK Hynix as the top supplier of HBM used in Nvidia’s data center GPUs, with Samsung advancing HBM3E qualifications and ramp plans. TSMC has been expanding CoWoS advanced packaging capacity used by Nvidia and AMD, but bottlenecks have continued to influence shipment timing.

Seoul’s policy continues to reinforce domestic buildouts. The K-CHIPS framework and follow on measures provide investment tax credits and power cost relief for advanced fabs, with the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy backing large memory and logic clusters around Yongin and Pyeongtaek. The objective is to anchor HBM and next generation memory at home as cloud customers pull orders forward for 2026 and 2027 installations.

China’s AI hardware shift

Export controls updated by Washington in 2023 constrained Nvidia shipments into China, which pushed major platforms toward domestic accelerators. Baidu’s Ernie, Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen services, ByteDance’s Doubao offerings, and startup DeepSeek’s models have all been released under China’s model filing regime, and Chinese clouds have added software support for Huawei Ascend 910 class chips to keep training and inference onshore.

The Cyberspace Administration of China maintains the filing system for public facing models, and state buyers have favored procurements that run on domestic silicon. Huawei’s Ascend and Baidu’s Kunlun lines have seen wider integration into framework stacks, and Chinese providers continue to optimize compilers and operators to reduce reliance on Nvidia only toolchains.

For global technology teams, memory and packaging in Korea remain the practical constraint on AI system rollouts, and software portability across Nvidia and domestic accelerators is now a core requirement for any product that targets China.