In the Seoul data center of a leading autonomous driving algorithm company, engineers are hurriedly modifying code, shifting the data processing tasks originally reliant on NVIDIA’s latest B200 chips to older models. They face not a shortage of chip supply, but a cost crisis triggered by the soaring price of HBM memory.
On January 25th, the Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy responded to the preliminary ruling of the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) by formally planning to file a complaint at the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the U.S. government’s CHIPS Act subsidy policy. The core of this move is to break through the U.S. control over the global high-bandwidth memory (HBM) supply chain. As the most critical storage component of AI chips, HBM is currently 90% monopolized by South Korean companies Samsung and SK Hynix. However, with the CHIPS Act, the U.S. is luring global semiconductor giants to build factories locally, including upcoming HBM production lines.
This technology sovereignty dispute is hitting the AI chip supply chain at a critical moment. NVIDIA’s latest B200 chips, designed for Tesla’s next-generation Full Self-Driving (FSD) system, require twice as much HBM memory as the current H100 model. As the U.S.-South Korea dispute intensifies, South Korean memory manufacturers have already postponed signing long-term supply contracts with U.S. AI chip companies and plan to raise prices by 20-30% in the second quarter. Tesla CEO Elon Musk publicly expressed his concerns last week, stating, “The FSD progress may slow down slightly due to chip supply issues.”
Market analysts note that the more serious risk comes from the future of technology leadership. The White House may issue new sanctions next month prohibiting South Korean companies from selling advanced HBM products containing U.S. technology to Chinese customers, which would directly impact major Chinese car companies and tech firms testing Tesla’s FSD. This would push the global autonomous driving race into a fragmented state of “dual supply chains.”
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