Did NVIDIA Crash Memory Stocks Like Micron and SanDisk Yesterday?

"Recently, NVIDIA purchased the IP and most the employees from startup Groq. The specifics of Groq's technology are fairly technical, but there's the key idea. Groq has been working on an entirely different architecture than NVIDIA's GPUs. In short, it utilizes a compiler that pre-plans operations. So instead of needing to coordinate high-bandwidth memory, Groq's chips execute a schedule using on-chip SRAM."

"Nvidia has long dominated AI training hardware, but inference favors efficiency over raw throughput, which is exactly why competitors have found an opening. Companies like Broadcom have argued that NVIDIA's GPUs aren't specialized enough for inference and will soon prove to be too expensive."

Micron and SanDisk shares rose in pre-market trading despite heavy sell-offs the previous day, while Korean semiconductor stocks experienced severe declines with KOSPI down 12%, SK Hynix dropping 9.6%, and Samsung falling 11.7%. The initial sell-offs may have been driven by investor concerns about NVIDIA's upcoming GTC conference announcement of a new chip system that could bypass high-bandwidth memory requirements. NVIDIA recently acquired Groq, a startup developing alternative chip architecture using on-chip SRAM and pre-compiled operations instead of traditional GPU designs reliant on high-bandwidth memory coordination. This architectural shift could reduce demand for memory components, explaining the memory sector's weakness.

Read at 24/7 Wall St.