Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron, the so-called "big three" memory makers, have all been given the green light to by Nvidia to supply it with their fourth-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM4) product lines.

Bloomberg reported Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirming the trio had all been certified to supply memory chips for its upcoming Vera Rubin platform, with Huang adding: “All three vendors are in production, and they’re all racing to support Vera Rubin.”

Samsung began mass production of its HBM4 lines in February, and this week announced it was shipping samples of its "enhanced" replacement, the upcoming HBM4E.

Nvidia is believed to have given the Samsung the nod for its HBM4 line back in January, with the chip giant’s threshold required for data transfer speeds at 10 Gb/s. SK Hynix and Micron Technology have also reached the required threshold, though the former has had to push back production of its HBM4 line.

There has been concern amid the ongoing memory shortage that the dearth could impact the rollout of Nvidia’s next-generation line, with prior reports suggesting shipments of the Rubin series were set to drop from 29% to 22% owing to memory issues and apparent power consumption problems.

During Computex, Huang revealed that Vera Rubin was in full production, with initial shipments expected later this year.

The memory shortage is already having a massive impact on the AI buildout, with the big three memory makers pushing lead times out as far as 2028. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) CEO C.C. Wei this week warned demand for AI chips could exceed supply for several years.

Such consternations have seen Nvidia race into action, with Huang looking to pull off some supplier magic to secure the components needed to meet Vera Rubin demand.

The CEO’s infamous "chimaek summit," in which he, along with two of Asia's most powerful men, walked into a fried chicken restaurant, chugged beer, and ultimately secured Nvidia's initial supply of memory hardware, was indicative of his approach to shoring up supply chains.

Nvidia more recently has opted to invest in suppliers to build out their manufacturing capacity, most notably with suppliers of optics as it gears up for the highly anticipated launch of co-packaged optic (CPO) iterations of lines from its networking portfolio. Ayar Labs, Lumentum, Corning, and Coherent all received backing from the chip giant, while Marvell was anointed “the next trillion-dollar company” by Huang during a keynote at Computex.

Huang explained his proactive approach to supply chain management during a GTC press briefing attended by SDxCentral, saying he was “constantly just looking across the entire life cycle of the technology and manufacturing across the supply chain” to “prepare our company for growth.”

“When you look upstream, you'll come to the conclusion that we're scaling,” the CEO said. “We're starting to scale our silicon photonics technology with Spectrum-6, and we're starting to add it to our scale-up technology with NVLink in the coming years, which means the amount of silicon photonics technology capacity that we need is substantially higher than the world has today.

“So we work with the supply chain to make sure that we can help them build up the capacity in advance," Huang continnued. "Sometimes we give them [a] prepayment. Sometimes we just give them a forecast. Sometimes, if the technology is in capacity or is quite light but needs to be much, much greater, we might decide to invest in the company and provide all of the other things as well.”