Samsung, Naver team up to develop AI chips

Samsung Electronics said Tuesday that the company will collaborate with local internet giant Naver to develop next-generation semiconductor solutions for advanced artificial intelligence systems.

The two companies will develop chip solutions that have greater capacity to process large-sized data, which existing computing systems have difficulties in dealing with, the firm said.

The duo seeks to find new solutions that better address the bottlenecks in advancing AI systems and maximize efficiency in power consumption as well.

Naver's scope of hyperscale AI technology will also help Samsung Electronics to increase efficiency of the company’s existing memory solutions.

Samsung Electronics has been developing next-generation memory technologies, involving computational storage, processing-in-memory, near-memory computing and compute express link.

Naver's experience in operating its own AI platform, dubbed HyperClova, and supercomputer infrastructure, will be of a great help to Samsung Electronics, the chipmaker said.

Naver released the AI platform Clova in 2017, offering various AI-based services for search, speech recognition and natural language processing. The company launched the supersized AI platform HyperClova in May last year.

The chip firm highlighted that it hopes to leverage Naver's experience in applying such technologies into online services that is used by tens of millions of users.

"Through our collaboration with Naver, (Samsung Electronics) will develop cutting-edge semiconductor solutions to solve the memory bottleneck in large-scale AI systems," said Han Jin-man, Samsung's executive vice president of memory sales and marketing.

"With tailored solutions that reflect the most pressing needs of AI service providers and users, we are committed to broadening our market-leading memory lineup including computational storage, PIM and more, to fully accommodate the ever-increasing scale of data."

"Combining our acquired knowledge and know-how from HyperClova with Samsung's semiconductor manufacturing prowess, we believe we can create an entirely new class of solutions that can better tackle the challenges of today's AI technologies," said Chung Suk-geun, the head of Naver's Clova division.