Today · report October 18

NVIDIA seeks TSMC 3nm HBM base dies; no firm has confirmed

Seoul Economic Daily, a Korean business daily, reports that NVIDIA has asked Samsung, SK hynix and Micron, the three suppliers of its custom HBM "NVHBM", to make the base die on TSMC's 3nm process. Samsung is said to have accepted after an internal review. The base die is the logic die at the bottom of an HBM stack. The sources are anonymous industry figures, and none of the three companies has confirmed publicly (Seoul Economic Daily, 2026-10-18; Dan Nystedt, 2026-10-18). The story was relayed on X by Dan Nystedt, a reporter who covers Taiwan and Korea semiconductors. The same story says NVHBM is NVIDIA's custom HBM based on HBM4E, unveiled in August. The report says Samsung's standard HBM keeps the base die on Samsung's own 4nm process, as does the custom HBM Samsung makes for AMD and other customers. The report calls this the first time Samsung and TSMC have worked together at the HBM manufacturing stage. Our read: if the report holds, the logic layer of this one product, NVHBM, would concentrate at TSMC. Samsung's standard HBM is not part of it. How we checked →

Concept illustration: two pale hands in dark sleeves hold open a newspaper with the masthead SEOUL ECONOMIC DAILY and grey lines of text down both edges, and at the top of its beige centre panel a white banner is lettered SAMSUNG twice, once in blue and once in white inside a blue oval. Below stand two stacks of four white blocks: the left stack has a block lettered HBM and rests on a black base, while the right stack, set against a pale pink circle, has blocks lettered NVIDIA (beside a green emblem) and NVHBM and rests on a brick-red base whose white label reads TSMC and tsmc.

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 19, 2026, alongside 9 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "NVIDIA seeks TSMC 3nm HBM base dies; no firm has confirmed." https://secondsource.io/en/news/2026-10-19-4/. Accessed access date.