SEOUL, Sept 26 Reuters SK Hynix shares jumped more than 9 on Thursday after the South Korean firm started mass production of the most advanced highbandwidth memory HBM chips, pulling ahead in a race to meet demand from an artificial intelligence AI boom.

Shares of the world39;s secondlargest memory chipmaker outperformed its bigger rival Samsung Electronics, whose shares rose 4, also boosted by the bullish outlook for AI demand from Micron overnight.

SK Hynix said in a statement it was the world39;s first latestgeneration HBM product, called HBM3E, with 12 layers and 50 bigger capacity than the previous eightlayer chips.

SK Hynix, which has been the main supplier of HBM chips to Nvidia, said it plans to supply the latest products to unidentified customers by the end of this year.

The competition is heating up to supply HBM chips, which aid in the processing of vast amounts of data to train AI technology and are crucial for Nvidia39;s graphics processing units.

Samsung Electronics said in July it plans to supply its productionready HBM3E 12high units to customers in the second half of this year.

Micron said earlier this month that it was shipping productioncapable HBM3E 12high units to key industry partners for qualification.

The benchmark South Korean stock index rose 1.7.

Reporting by Joyce Lee and Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Jacqueline Wong, Muralikumar Anantharaman and Ed Davies

Source Reuters