Samsung Electronics has secured a contract with Naver to supply $752 million worth of its upcoming Mach-1 AI accelerator chips. With this agreement, both companies collaborate to strengthen their foothold in the competitive artificial intelligence (AI) market.
The contract aims to reduce Naver’s reliance on Nvidia AI chips, which face supply constraints and high costs. Naver’s announcement regarding the stability testing of Samsung Electronics’ upcoming AI inference chip, the ‘Mach-1’, showed the company’s anticipation for the technology co-developed with Samsung Electronics.
The collaboration between Samsung Electronics and Naver on developing the Mach-1 AI chip commenced in 2022. Both companies formed a dedicated task force to tackle AI semiconductor solutions.
Lee Dong-soo, Director of Naver Cloud and the lightweight AI research team, actively contributed to the development process. Director Lee Dong-soo, leveraging his prior experience in deep learning at Samsung Research, played a pivotal role in this collaboration.
CEO Soo-yeon Choi spoke about the Mach-1 project during Naver’s recent shareholders’ meeting. He emphasized that as Naver transitions into the AI era, ensuring cost-effectiveness in chip procurement is crucial for companies offering large-scale services like Naver. He also talked about the importance of Mach-1’s development, noting its potential to deliver highly efficient inference capabilities, albeit mentioning that the scale of Naver’s utilization of Mach-1 is yet to be finalized.
Samsung plans to deliver between 150,000 and 200,000 units of the Mach-1 AI chips to Naver at an approximate price of $3,756 per unit. These chips will be integrated into Naver’s servers, enhancing its AI map service, Naver Place, with advanced AI inference capabilities.
Unlike Nvidia’s accelerators, which rely on GPUs and HBM chips, the Mach-1 AI accelerator by Samsung is distinct, featuring a combination of the company’s processors and low-power DRAM chips. This unique composition promises cost savings, estimated to be one-tenth of Nvidia’s hardware, and offers reduced data bottlenecks and power consumption. Samsung claims that the Mach-1 can boost efficiency by up to eight times.
Kyeong-Hyeon Kye, head of Samsung Electronics DS division, highlighted the chip’s capabilities, emphasizing its goal to reduce memory processing by one-eighth while achieving eight times greater power efficiency.
The Mach-1 AI accelerator has a design that incorporates low-power DRAM rather than high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and stands out for its efficiency and speed. Samsung Electronics introduced the Mach-1 at its recent general shareholders’ meeting.
Meanwhile, during the shareholders’ meeting, Naver addressed several agenda items, including the approval of financial statements and appointments of outside directors and audit committee members. With six agenda items approved, Naver continues to navigate strategic decisions to drive its corporate governance and operational efficiency forward.
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